


Dial / Tone

by justanotheranonymouswriter



Category: Suits (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst and Porn, Character Study, Feels, Gen, Pre-Relationship, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:07:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 76,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24073435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanotheranonymouswriter/pseuds/justanotheranonymouswriter
Summary: "I'm the person you call at six in the morning. Or at midnight when you need someone."All those phone calls Donna mentioned? Yeah, let's imagine those. A fic tracing Harvey and Donna's relationship through the seasons of the show through the medium of late night confessions on the phone. Sticks with canon, but there'll be some divergence along the wayIt's relationship stuff and it's some good old fashioned angst, and some smut for good measure.
Relationships: Donna Paulsen & Harvey Specter, Donna Paulsen/Harvey Specter
Comments: 98
Kudos: 147





	1. History

Harvey falls asleep on the phone a lot.

Donna remembers the first time he did. It was after they’d both left the DA’s office, after Harvey had brought her across with him to his new job, after they’d crossed the line of ‘I don’t date people I work with’ (they hadn’t dated, but that felt superfluous anyway considering Harvey had spent half the night covered in cream and buried in her while she dragged her tongue over his skin and scratched marks down his back) and they’d agreed never to talk about it and put it out of their minds.

‘It’, of course, wasn’t just avoiding talking about the sex. Sex was … sex. The sex had been amazing, yes, but that wasn’t just it. The sex wasn’t the thing that made them both shy away from ever acknowledging that night. What stopped them was that there had been a moment, somewhere in the dark between the moonrise and the dawn, where she swears that time itself had shut down to watch them, tangled against each other and breathing the whole world into gasping lungs, and it was absolutely one of those moments that would have changed the course of both their lives instantly and irrevocably if one of them had been just the tiniest bit braver in that diner the next day.

Even so, their lives still changed irrevocably, despite both of them trying their hardest for that night to be nothing more than a blip.

She’d felt forever in his hands. She doesn’t know how else to explain it. But he’d asked her to work for him, and Donna has her rule. It was a good rule, a smart rule, because Donna was intelligent and capable and really, really good at her job. She didn’t want her skill to be confused with luck, and she definitely didn’t want it muddied with water cooler talk of ‘did you hear she’s fucking her boss’. So she drew a line in the sand, and she pushed both Harvey and the forever he held in his hands over that line.

They both stood as close to the line as they could, but they didn’t cross it, and as the years go on Donna finds it easier to ignore how much they both want to.

It’s a while, and things almost go back to normal. Normal for Donna and Harvey isn’t what most people would call normal. It’s what most people would call ‘just get fucking married already’. At least that’s what Rachel calls it, and then Mike, later, when Harvey pulls him into his frustratingly dangerous orbit.

She’s not sure. She’s not sure if normal is even the right word for it. Her normal is hovering around Harvey like she’s in orbit and he’s the sun and it’s only the momentum of work-laugh-tease-home that stops her from crashing into him. Her normal is knowing what he needs before he needs it. Her normal is sleeping with important files under her pillow so they don’t get lost, and thinking ‘he’d like this’ when she buys dresses for work, and trying to pretend his just-innocent-enough flirting doesn’t make her want to tear his clothes off and mess up his hair.

It’s working okay. It’s hard, sometimes, and relationships just never seem to work, because he’s there in the shadows all the time, but it’s working okay.

And then one night, past midnight, her phone vibrates on her nightstand. And it’s Harvey.

Harvey calls after work, when he needs a file or a meeting organised or something prepped for the first thing that day. But he never calls after 9pm, and she knows that’s not so much him respecting her work boundaries as it is that 9pm is when he goes out to drink and gamble and find young blonde twenty-somethings that he can invite back to his apartment and his bed.

Donna used to be someone with healthy work boundaries. She used to audition, and read for plays, and use her evenings to use her degree, and she doesn’t do that much anymore. She doesn’t resent it - it just is. But it also means that she used to be out at some theatre bar, laughing with the crew and cast, and now she’s home, and Harvey is calling. Maybe in the past she wouldn’t have answered, out of principle, but it’s Harvey, and it’s Harvey after 9pm, when it’s unusual to be Harvey calling, and maybe something is wrong, so she answers.

“Hey,” he says.

“Harvey, it’s late. Are you okay? Do you need anything?”

As she asks she fumbles on her night stand for the pen and pad she keeps there. Harvey is not a 9-5 commitment, and she finds anticipating his needs easier when she has something to make notes on when she wakes up at 2am with a hunch that he needs something.

There’s silence on the line.

“Harvey? You there?” She tucks the phone into her shoulder.

“Yeah.”

“What do you need? Have you thought of something with the case against Dolgny Pharmaceuticals? I saw you pacing around with that paperwork they sent through this morning and I -“

“I couldn’t sleep.”

That’s not what she was expecting.

“You couldn’t sleep,” she repeats.

“No.” He sounds embarrassed and frustrated, like he’s more confused that he’s calling than that he can’t sleep,and he has the tone in his voice he gets when he’s secretly hoping she’ll explain his feelings to him so they can stop clutching at his chest and lungs. “I’ve been lying here for…” There’s a pause and she imagines him checking the clock next to his bed. “… two hours. I’m exhausted. There’s no reason I can’t sleep. I just can’t.”

“Something on your mind?”

“I...” he trails off before he even gets started. Donna supposes that asking him about his feelings point blank is not a good way to start.

She settles back against the pillows. “Does this have anything to do about that phone call from Malik yesterday?”

“… how did you know about that?” he asks, but there’s no real bite to the words. Of course she knows. He called to ask about an old case. One of the ones Cameron Dennis got a conviction on by burying evidence. Malik wasn’t calling about that, he just had a few basic questions because the prisoner was appealing and he’d taken over the case. Malik and Harvey hated each other, but not enough not to extend the professional courtesy of a quick handover to each other. He wasn’t sleepless because he was turning over panic about buried evidence, Donna knew. Harvey can deal with worry. Harvey can deal with what-if.

Harvey can’t deal with guilt. There’s a reason he runs from it like it’s fire. “You’re feeling bad about leaving the DA’s office,” she says.

“It was the right decision.”

“I know. It’s possible to make the right decision and still feel conflicted about it.”

“Why?” He sounds like he wants it to be simple and he’s frustrated that it isn’t.

“Because doing the right thing usually isn’t as easy in reality as it is in theory.”

“I was..” he starts, then stops. She can almost feel him plucking at the sheets next to him. He likes to fiddle with things when he’s being honest. It’s almost like he has to distract himself just enough to let the truth through. “I was thinking about who Cameron might have put away who shouldn’t have been.” He pauses for a moment, then corrects himself. “I mean I was thinking about what else he’s hidden to get the people he needed to locked away.” Donna thinks he meant the first thing he said and not the second, it’s just the first thing is too close to something he’s not ready for. Guilty people sitting in prison because Cameron ignored procedure is one thing. Innocent people sitting in prison because Cameron couldn’t see anything but the need to win was another altogether.

Donna is silent for a moment. Cameron is a sore spot between them. Harvey’s loyal. Donna isn’t. Not to Cameron, anyway.

She doesn’t think about if it was Harvey in Cameron’s position and her in Harvey’s because that would be entirely too much to think about and too close to her admitting she’d have done the same thing in his shoes.

“I think about that too, sometimes.”

“Yeah?” He sounds relieved, but Donna doesn’t think he notices it. Harvey keeps himself so busy pretending he doesn’t need people that he doesn’t realise how obvious it is that he does.

“Yeah.” Her hand flexes on the sheets. If they’d been discussing this in his office she might have reached out to grab his hand, she’s trying to do it now instinctively. It’s probably good he’s just calling, she thinks.

A pause. “Do you think I did the right thing?”

Donna has never heard that from him. Ever. She considers what it is about a phone call in the middle of the night that makes him able to show her how thin he feels over this and she wonders how many nights he’s lain awake turning it over in his head and not having anyone to talk to.

“Harvey-“

“Because maybe I should have gone to the judge and ratted on Cameron. But then that would have opened up a field day for all those guilty pieces of shit he nailed. All those cases, all the paperwork you found? All those guys who should be in jail, what if they’d gotten their cases turned over? What if they’d gotten out? What if they’d-“ he doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to. They’re both thinking about the innocent lives that would have gotten torn up in the crossfire.

“Sometimes there isn’t a perfect answer,” Donna says quietly. It’s not much, she knows. But it’s all she can offer.

“I did the best I could.” She hears his voice crack on the last word, and maybe he wanted to say more, but she can hear his breath punching into the phone line while he tries to compose himself and wonders why, even at midnight on the phone to someone he’s called like it’s a confession booth, he’s still acting like he’s stronger than he is. 

“Oh, Harvey,” she says. “I know you did.”

He’s quiet. She gives it a minute, but he just breathes down the line and she can hear him opening his mouth and closing it again, and maybe whatever he wants to say is too far gone for him to feel like he has the right to drag her into it.

So, after a minute, Donna says, “Did you hear about Nicole?”

“Louis’ secretary?”

“Mmhmm. Quit.”

“No way. Finally?”

“You’ll never guess how.”

She tells him stories until he falls asleep, murmurs, “Harvey,” and when he doesn’t answer, she ends the call, and presses herself under her blankets and into her pillows, and quietly worries about him.

.

Harvey keeps calling. At first she’s surprised, but then it becomes regular. He doesn’t call every night, but he never goes more than a week without calling either. Then he starts calling earlier. Before midnight, then before eleven, then before ten.

Sometimes he calls right at 9pm, and when he does he sounds shy, which is not like him, and she could almost swear that he’s just been pacing and waiting until it’s late enough to call her to talk about things that aren’t work.

“Did I ever tell you about the time my dad took me to a Yankees game?” he begins once.

Another time, he says, “I was just watching tv and there’s an ad for a new exhibition at the Guggenheim and I thought you might wanna know about it.”

Sometimes he still calls late because he can’t sleep. Sometimes he calls early because he wants to talk about nothing. Sometimes he asks her some ambiguous question about ethics or love and leaves her casting for answers while he waits patiently on the other end of the line as if she’s the Dalai Lama.

It’s just when he needs someone. He calls when he needs her.

One day, he calls, a couple of nights after his dad passes. This one wakes her up - it’s late, even later than when he usually calls late.

“Harvey.” Her voice is sleep drunk when she answers after one too many rings.

“Sorry, I woke you. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“No, it’s okay.” She shifts against the pillows, pushing a hand through her hair and shaking the ends out. She swallows a yawn. “How’s Boston? How was the wake?”

“Not ... great.”

“What happened?”

“Lily was there. She had Bobby with her.”

“You knew that might happen, Harvey.”

“I know, and I thought I had everything under control. But I saw him with her and... I saw red, Donna. I just blacked out. I don’t even know what I said. I just yelled at them and left.”

“Harvey-“

“What the fuck kind of grown man has a tantrum at their dad’s wake, Donna.”

She doesn’t say anything.

He sighs, the sigh he reserves for scrubbing his hands through his hair and over his face. She can feel him. She can feel the day old beard, she can feel his hair straggled and insolent from being pushed away from his forehead, she can feel his tie loose around his neck. She can feel him, tired and threadbare and done.

“What’s wrong with me,” he murmurs, and she hates that crack in his voice. He sounds small, and lost, and like - well, like a sixteen year old kid who discovered his mother having an affair and now doesn’t know what to do with all the weight of secret and dishonestly that’s suddenly landed on his shoulders.

Donna considers for a moment.

“You loved your dad. And you’re not perfect.”

“I still shouldn’t have done that.”

“No. You shouldn’t have.” She pauses before asking, “can you apologise?”

“Maybe,” he says, but it’s reluctant and it sounds like ’no’.

“Come home,” she says, and they both ignore how much that sounds like they’re much more than they are.

“Got a flight first thing tomorrow. Hotel’s paid up tonight so I figured I may as well stay.” She hears him sit, probably on the edge of the bed. “Did I ever tell you about how much I love Boston?”

Harvey talks to her, edging his way back towards the headboard and pillows as he does so. She imagines him, staring at the ceiling, one arm pillowing behind his head, legs crossed at the ankles, his suit rumpling and creasing as he stretches out. He tells to her about architecture and Fenway Park until his words drift off and his breathing is slow and steady.

She listens to him in the quiet, and pushes away the absurd need to get on a plane and go to him.

“Goodnight, Harvey,” she says, and hangs up.

.

There’s one time, just one time it goes too far.

He calls, drunk. She’s been chasing a bottle of wine to the bottom of the bottle and she’s not far behind him either. He’s broken up with Scottie, she’s broken up with … whoever the fuck it was. She’s already forgotten his name. He’d at least had the good sense, unlike Mitchell, to see what she and Harvey were and call it early. They hadn’t been seeing each other long. Long enough for a couple of evenings that ended in ‘do you want to come up?’, and they were nice but it was still early enough in the relationship that it was Harvey that danced before her eyes when he’d climbed onto her and into her, and it was Harvey’s name she’d had to bite back on when she’d come. Ever since the other time he’s done that, invaded her first nights with anyone else. She’s never told him, because they’ve agreed not to talk about, but also because she thinks if she told him he might flash that smug grin at her so wide he’d probably dislocate his own jaw.

It hadn’t really mattered. It hadn’t really bothered her. But it was still another break up. And it was still another breakup because of Harvey.

So when he calls her, drunk, and she answers, drunk, still in her dress from dinner but with her shoes kicked off and a mostly empty bottle of merlot in front of her, her legs tucked up under her on her sofa, there’s already trouble brewing on the horizon between them.

“Hey Donna.” He says it like there’s an extra N and two more A’s in her name than there are and she knows what it means when he draws it out like that. She smiles. She never admits she likes him when he’s drunk. He’s slower, lazier. More thoughtful, somehow. More honest.

“Hey you. How many have you had.”

“Half. Halfish. I’m at home.” Either Ray has just dropped him off, or he’s been robustly working his way through his private collection of single malts. Probably a bit of both. Half a bottle is impressive, even for him.

“Good night?”

“Charity event.” He’s distracted, she can feel the twisting of a cork plug in his hands, knows the phone is wedged between his shoulder and his ear. “Fuckin’ ... cancer or something. Bar sucked. Fuck.” She hears him fumble, and the pop of a cork, and the slosh of alcohol into a tumbler. “Not worth the tux and the ten grand.”

“Who tied your bow tie?”

“Did it myself,” he says, his pride half joke and half genuine. She hears him sigh as he sits. Probably on his bed. When he first started calling it was from his living room, unless he was calling because he couldn’t sleep. Now he calls from bed mostly, even when it’s only 9pm. “How was your night?”

“Dinner with the date. Then wine and watching the final scene Dirty Dancing several times.”

“Ahh.” He thinks for a moment. “What’s his name? Ben? You guys break up?”

“Yup.” She doesn’t say why. Maybe he knows why. Maybe he doesn’t. Harvey’s usually oblivious.

“Did you break it off or did he?”

She takes a sip and she’s not sure if the warmth in her belly is her wine or his voice. “He did.”

“Huh.” She hears him swallow, imagines the grimace. He always swallows too much whisky at once when he’s drunk.

“Fucking idiot,” he says, almost to himself.

She freezes. He’s never said anything like that before.

“Yeah,” She says, keeping her voice neutral. She’s noncommittal but she wishes she wasn’t.

“When?” he asks.

“Tonight. At dinner.”

“Bastard.” It’s his favourite pastime, calling her ex-boyfriends bastards. She’s never said she enjoys it as much as he does.

“I know. Got a new dress and everything.”

“Yeah?” She hears him shift, and has the bizarre intuition he’s working his courage up for something. And then, he says, “what are you wearing?”

_God._

There’s a layer of gravel in the back of his throat she’s never heard before and it lands directly in her belly.

She should shut him down. He’s not asking as a friend. It’s suggestive and flirtatious and she should _not_ be feeling the thrill up her spine that she does. She should say goodnight and hang up, they’re both drunk and vulnerable and needy and it’s a bad combo. She should cut this off right now, she thinks.

But instead, she says, “Mr. Specter, are you flirting with me?” and her own voice has also taken on a register she’s never used with him, ever. It’s half an octave lower than normal and mostly breath.

“Just curious,” he says, but his tone says ‘yes’.

She tells him about the dress, navy blue and form fitting to her waist, calf length, with a flare framing her hips and her legs just so. She details the designer and the flourishes she loves about it, but she’s fairly certain the details are lost on him. Harvey only ever cares about four things when he asks about dresses. The only thing he ever admits to caring about is colour. She knows the other three things are how her tits look, how her ass looks, and how easy it might be to get off quickly if he needed to. She’s figured that out by the way his eyes blow wide when she wears certain designers and certain styles in the office. He daydreams. She knows.

Sometimes she does it on purpose.

“Mmm,” he says when she finishes, and she’s not sure if he’s just acknowledging or if it’s appreciation. “Bet you had some killer shoes as well.”

“Oh, they came off the second I got home,” she says lightly. “Stilettos are not comfortable.”

“Yeah, but they look great.” Then, as if he feels the need to point out he’s not just generalising, “on you.”

“Still not worth wearing a second longer than I have to. You’ll just have to use your imagination.”

“Oh, I am.”

She pauses for just a moment. They’re rapidly approaching lines and boundaries, and her stomach and heart are fluttering with the fervent hope he’ll just keep going but it’s also terrifying. “Harvey, maybe we should...”

“I wanna talk,” he says, but she knows his voice and his undercurrents and she swears it sounds like ‘I want to fuck’.

“This isn’t talking. Besides. You’re drunk.”

“You’re gorgeous. And I’m not that drunk.”

Goddammit, he’s really going to do it, she thinks. “Harvey -“

“Do you want me to stop?”

“Harvey.”

He sighs. “Donna, just tonight, can we just ... be who we are?”

“I’m not sure that’s a safe thing for us to be.” It’s the closest either of them have come to anything close to talking about her and him and the thing they don’t talk about. She feels her stomach flip and she’s terrified and scared and turned on all at once, and she genuinely doesn’t know what she’s going to do.

“Then tell me to stop.” A pause. “Donna.. do you want to stop?”

“...no.”

_Holy shit._

She can practically hear his smile at that. Smug bastard.

“How easy is it for you to undo your dress?”

“Not hard. It has a zipper in the side.”

She hears him knock back the rest of his drink and drop the glass on the bedside table. “Unzip it. Slowly.”

She listens to his slow, steady breathing as she does, tries to regulate her own, she doesn’t want him to hear just how much the wine and his voice is affecting her. She slides the zipper down, the slight cool of the night flushing across her skin as she does.

“Okay.”

“How does it feel?”

“This conversation? It feels crazy.” She slides her hand in at her waist, lets her fingers fall onto her stomach under her dress, drawing slow circles. “But undoing my dress feels good. Freeing.”

“Mmm.” His voice is pure gravel and whisky. “Are you touching yourself?”

“My stomach. I need to pull my dress down to do any more.”

“Pull it.” Fuck, he’s never sounded more decisive, and she didn’t know that hearing his voice like this was a kink she had. “Touch yourself the way you would if it was just you.”

Well, fuck. She guesses they’ve just blown past the lines they’ve drawn for themselves. So fuck it. She sets her phone to speaker and drops it next to her. She slides the structured torso of her dress down, quietly thankful the boning stitched in means she didn’t need a bra. She slides a hand back over her stomach, up between her breasts and then over. She’s never done this before, with anyone, let alone with Harvey. It’s terrifying and exhilarating all at once. She tries hard to hold onto her breathing. “I’m touching myself,” she murmurs. “Stomach. Breasts.” She flicks her nipple, pushes out a slow breath.

“God. I can’t tell you how often I’ve wanted to push my hands over you and tease your nipples. I swear to god Donna. I think about it almost every day.”

She hums at that, teases both nipples into taut buds and wonders how even across a phone line the rumble in his voice can spike a flush of damp against her underwear. “I think about it too,” she says. “You against me. Your … tongue. Fuck.” She pushes her hips back against the sofa for some relief. “And I want to run my hands over your chest,” she says. “Taste you. Are you sensitive on your chest?”

“I am.” There’s a reason he wears so many three piece suits, she’s always thought, and maybe it’s to push another layer between her and him because he probably knows she wants to get her hands on him, over him, press around and over his chest until she can tease his nipples tight and suck her mouth over them.

She tells him that, and he huffs a moan into the air between them.

“I’ve got my hands on myself,” he says. “On my chest. Undoing my buttons. God damn.” He’s quiet for a moment, gathering concentration and breathing solidly, and says, “wish it was your mouth and hands on me.”

She only just stops herself from telling him to come over right now.

Then, he says, “can you reach your underwear.”

She hums, pulls the front of her dress up enough to slide her hand over the front of her underwear. They’re damp, and she presses her palm flat against herself for a moment of relief. “I’ve got my hand against me,” she says.

“And you’re still playing with your breasts with your other hand?”

“I am.” Her breathing is trying to get away from her. She keeps it slow and steady but it’s punching out her lungs with more force than she has control over. “Touch yourself.”

“I’m pushing my hand over the front of my pants,” he says, his breath catching just a little. She swears she can hear him popping the button at the waist. There’s a moment of silence, then, “take your panties off.”

She slides them down, lifts her hips a little so she can slide them off her legs. Her hand goes back automatically, sliding between her legs. “They’re off,” she murmurs. “Your turn.”

“I’ve got my pants open. Fly down,” he says. “I’m pushing my hand over myself.’ He grunts. “I’m so hard already. Did you know your voice does that to me?”

“It does?”

“Mmm. Sometimes I can’t... get up from my desk. Especially when you... tease me. Fuck.”

She’s never heard him swear so much, and she also didn’t know how much the sound of him swearing in this context could send sparks up her skin. The mental picture of him palming his dick while thinking of her is maddening and empowering all at once and she has to take a second to focus her breathing because her body is threatening to run away without her. She presses a finger between her folds, lightly, pretends it’s him.

“I’m not going to lie. I’ve thought about this a lot,” he continues.

“How a lot?”

“A lot a lot.” He grunts. “Fuck. It’s constant. I can’t even get myself off any more without…” He leaves the thought unfinished. He doesn’t need to finish it. They both know.

“Harvey,” she breathes and it’s not to tell him what to do. It’s just to say it. She just wants to say his name. She listens to him breathing for a moment, then volunteers, “I’m running my finger over my pussy.”

“How.”

“In between. Just a little.”

“Are you wet?”

She almost laughs at that. “You have no idea.”

“Tell me.”

“Harvey, you make me wet just the way you look at me. When you’re really angry or happy or sometimes just because.” She pauses a moment. “You really have no idea do you.”

“Is that true?” he says after a beat. He sounds almost hopeful. Like it might mean something. Because it does. But they don’t talk about it.

Donna pushes that thought away, which is easy. Her body is gasoline and he’s matches, and the quiet moans hitching through his breathing sparks lightning in her abdomen. She slips another finger along her lips, teasing herself apart, and she lets her fingertips nudge her clit, just lightly. She huffs a moan. ”Mmm. Yeah. At the office, or when you call, sometimes.”

“In the office?”

“I keep spare underwear in my drawer.”

“Fuck. Really.”

“I have to.” She knows this is a line she can’t ignore even if they pretend tonight never happened. The office is neutral ground she she’s about to declare war, but she says it anyway, he’s already half blown it up himself and she wonders what the hell power it is that he has over her. “Sometimes I have to use the private bathrooms and get myself off thinking about you just so I can fucking concentrate.”

He moans at at that. “God. I’ve got my hand around my cock. I’m stroking it slowly. Squeezing the head. And on the phone?”

“Not on the phone. Not while we’re talking. But after. I touch myself like this.” She pushes a breath out. “Two fingers now. Just teasing. Touching my clit a little.”

“Tell me how to touch myself. How you’d do it.”

“Grip firmly. Just pull yourself off slowly. Is your other hand free?”

He takes a moment to answer. “Yeah.”

“Cup yourself and massage lightly. Just tease with your fingers. Firmer with your other hand.”

He’s quiet for a moment, and she can hear his breathing shallow out and the delicious sounds of his hand slicking over his cock. He’s definitely spreading precome down his length.

“Good?” she asks.

“Good. Fuck Donna this is ...”

Hot. “Yeah. It is.”

“Tell me.”

“I’m wet, Harvey. Fingers are sliding along my lips.”

“Inside.” It’s guttural. “Curl your fingers up into yourself.”

She slips one finger in and then another, up to her knuckles, and she’s tight around her own hand. She says his name and he grunts in response. She strokes, lengthening her fingers until she finds the spot she’s looking for, _there_ , and she presses, strokes, and moans before she can breathe through the sensation and get words backing her mouth. “God,” she breathes.

“Good?”

“Good.” She can hear her breath pitching higher. “So good.” She pauses a moment, bizarrely shy considering she’s on the phone with Harvey and they’re both almost out of control, then says almost in a rush, “I wish it was you inside me.”

“Fucking hell.”

“Your weight on top of me, pushing your cock inside me. It would be.” She doesn’t finish, she just moans at the same time he does, then, “I thought about you when I fucked Ben.” She doesn’t say she thought about him every time she’s fucked anyone since that first night. Thinking about Harvey while she fucks some four-date guy is very different to thinking about fucking Harvey for six years even when she’s in a full-blown ‘call him my boyfriend’ relationship, and it’s too much.

“I thought about you when I fucked Scottie.”

Jesus. That is a lot.

“You ... did?” The pause is half arousal and half her not sure she wants to hear the answer.

“Not always. But sometimes. Almost said... your name. Once. Fuck. I’m so hard. Touch your clit.”

Donna slides her other hand between her legs, finds her clit with her thumb, presses down until she finds a rhythm that works with the slide and tuck of her fingers inside her. She hums deep from her core.

“What are you thinking about.” His words are staggered, scattered.

“You inside me. I’d be so tight around you. And your fingers on my clit. Fucking me till I come. Letting you come in me.” She’s found it, found the spot and the rhythm and she’s chasing her orgasm now. She can feel her stomach clenching. “Jesus Harvey I’m close.”

“Me too.” She can hear him stroking faster.

“Tell me.”

“God dammit. I want you. Wanna bury myself in you, just deep and slow.” He’s drawing his words out long and low and it spikes inside her, she’s all tension and sweat and _nearly_. “Just take my time. Kiss up your neck and all over your skin. Push your legs over my shoulders so I can push in further.’ She hears him swallow. “You better be close Donna because I can’t last much longer.”

“I’m close. I’m almost - fuck. There. Keep talking.”

Something breaks then. Harvey’s murmuring away to her, but he suddenly isn’t talking about the physicality of what he wants to do with and to her. It’s much more intimate and much further than that. He’s not telling her she’s hot but that she’s beautiful. He tells her he can’t stop thinking about her, about her hair and her eyes and her smile, and she thinks dimly only he could make some drunken night of ill advised phone sex feel something like making love.

“Harvey,” she says, and then she’s falling apart, and he strokes a few more times, tries to say her name but it bites off behind his moan as he comes.

Then, silence, other than the sound of her breathing and his breathing coming through her speaker, and it feels strangely intimate to hear him catching his breath, and she imagines what he’s like when he’s come, if he stretches and rolls away or if he reaches out instinctively to tangle fingers through hair, and for some reason the thought of that pangs jealously through her. She brushes her own hair back, feeling her sweat slowly cooling against her skin.

She’s going to have to get her dress dry cleaned.

“You okay?” she asks.

“I’m good. I’m here.” He takes another breath then blows it out and she knows he’s steadying his throat before he chuckles. “I’m going to need a new tux.”

Silence.

“Harvey.”

“Donna.”

“That was -“

“Yeah.”

“We can’t -“

“I know.”

.

A week later, he calls her and asks her to put on channel 12, and there’s a rerun of Die Hard on because it’s just before thanksgiving and it’s getting close to Christmas and it’s the only Christmas movie he’ll watch. She watches it with him and debates him, claiming it’s not a Christmas movie, and he calls her a snob. She asks questions she knows will annoy him. He quotes the key parts for her, and he eats popcorn while she eats chocolate.

He falls asleep half an hour after the movie finishes while he’s talking to Donna about the sequels. Donna doesn’t hang up. She plugs her phone in on her bedside table and climbs into bed, lies in the dark with the sound of Harvey breathing, deep and steady and calming next to her and she thinks, I’m in trouble.

.

He calls her on Thanksgiving.

She’s at her parents, worn out from family laughter and stories, recounted shared histories and arguments over the best way to do the dishes, and one too many servings of pumpkin pie. She’s pleasantly full, wearing her dads sweatshirt and an old pair of track pants she’s owned so long that she’s not even sure when and where she first got them. Her parents are in bed, and her sister is elsewhere reading. Donna’s sitting in front of the fireplace, knees at her chin, thinking and quiet. She loves New York, loves the bustle and adventure and promise, but her parents house is a haven and she loves that too. It’s where she can just be. No distractions, no sirens, no early morning language from the garbage collectors, and so she always avoids turning on the tv or scrolling through Facebook. She just watches the fire, and thinks about nothing and everything.

Her phone rings, and it’s him.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Are you fat?”

She laughs. “I’m working on it. Are you drunk?”

“I’ll get there.”

It’s a running gag, a joke they make every year, but it’s getting harder for her to play along. She knows where he is. He’s at home by himself in his apartment, because he won’t go to Boston for Thanksgiving. He’s not with Jessica or Louis or Rachel either. They’d all invite him to their own family celebrations in a second if they knew, but they don’t, because Harvey’s never told them he doesn’t go to Boston for Thanksgiving. He takes the day off so they think he’s travelling, and the day after so they think he’s travelling back. He might not lie if any of them asked outright if he goes. But they don’t ask, they just assume, so he doesn’t say anything.

Donna asked though, several years ago, and he almost didn’t say anything to her either, but then she reminded him she’d know if he was lying, and then he still didn’t say anything, but he sat there looking sheepish, silent while she guessed out loud that he takes two days off and sits at home drinking alone, and that’s basically the same as Harvey telling her anyway.

Harvey doesn’t ask for help. Harvey doesn’t need anyone. So Harvey never lets anyone know, anyone but Donna, that he sits by himself on Thanksgiving, trapped between the family he can’t be with and the friends he can’t talk to.

“Do you want to come to my parents?” Donna had offered.

Harvey had smiled, but it was sad and, she thinks, lonely. “I don’t think your dad would approve.”

“He’ll get over it.”

“I’m okay. Honestly.” He shrugged at her. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been there for Thanksgiving or Christmas. It’s…” she could see him searching for a word that’s not ‘fine’, because they both knew it wasn’t. “It’s normal. This is how it is. But thank you.”

She doesn’t believe in physical heartbreak, but if she had, she could have sworn she heard her own ribcage crack at the resignation in his voice.

“You can call me,” Donna suggested instead.

“I-“

“Harvey. Nobody should go all Thanksgiving without having someone to talk to. Just… promise you’ll call. Five minutes. Then you can sit in the dark and brood and become a full blown alcoholic all you want.”

He’d laughed at that. “Five minutes.”

“Five minutes.”

“Okay. You got it. I promise.”

And that’s what he’d done since that year. He’d called. Every Thanksgiving. The first year was just for five minutes. But as the years have gone by, the minutes have stretched out, and lengthened, and morphed into something that’s hours. Sometimes they have to both have their phones plugged into the wall for power, and they sit together in the silence and read, and one of them will excuse themselves for a few minutes to make a drink, or get something to eat, or for Harvey to answer the door to the delivery guy while Donna gives him shit for still refusing to cook on Thanksgiving of all days.

Donna never thinks about how she always makes sure she’s single, or has a good reason not to have a boyfriend with her, at Thanksgiving.

Eventually, one of them yawns one too many times, and announces, “bed time.” They keep their phones on while they brush their teeth, and put pyjamas on (the first couple of years Harvey suggestively asks what she’s wearing, but after they cross that line and gasp orgasms into their phones together he doesn’t any more) and climb into bed.

“Where are you this year?” Harvey asks.

“Attic. Mom’s turned my room into a studio.”

“Nice.”

“Harvey, I’m in my 30’s. They needed to reclaim it sometime.”

“Still.” But there’s a smile in his voice.

They talk, and laugh quietly in the inky blackness, and sometimes she thinks, _if only_. 

“Happy thanksgiving, Donna.” He doesn’t say he’s grateful to her. He doesn’t have to. She knows.

“Happy thanksgiving, Harvey.”

She waits until he falls asleep, and she doesn’t hang the phone up.

_End_


	2. Season One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Season One. Of files and flirting and the other time.

The first time Donna calls Harvey after 9pm is just after he hires Mike. 

“Hey,” he says, when he picks up the phone. He doesn’t sound surprised, but he also let it ring a few beats longer than usual, and Donna thinks he was probably massaging the handset in his palm while he decided if he wanted to answer it or not. 

“Hey,” she says. She takes a sip from her glass, and she settles back into the couch. He’s not out tonight. She can hear the silence of his apartment behind his voice. Her glass rings out lightly against the coffee table as she puts it back down. 

Harvey must hear it. “Riesling?” he asks. 

“Gewürztraminer.”

Harvey pauses. “The one that new client dropped off?”

“Mmhmm.”

“The one the new client dropped off for me?”

She smiles. “Oh please. You hate white wine. And I was going to thank you tomorrow. It’s a lovely vintage.” 

He laughs easily, and she hears him pouring himself a drink. “So,” he says expectantly. There’s a question hovering around the word. 

“So. You hired a kid that didn’t go to Harvard.” 

It’s his turn to hum noncommittally. “It’s a dumb rule,” he says, and she can hear him hoping she won’t notice the way that he’s admitting to something and lying about something else at the same time. 

“You only decided it’s a dumb rule today, and only because it gets in the way of what you were always going to do anyway.” She gives him a moment, and when he’s clearly decided not to volunteer what was sitting under the tone in his voice, she presses gently. “And what other rules did you break in the process of breaking that one?”

He sighs. “Have I ever told you I hate it when you do that?”

“Plenty. Spill.”

“Donna.”

“Harvey.” She’s keeping her voice light, but there’s a nervousness sitting in her stomach that’s curling towards him and that she’s trying to ignore. She has instincts for him. She hasn’t worked for them, they just … are. It’s a mix of her natural ability to connect with people and the way she just knows him better than anyone. She’s been years with him, next to him and near him in the day, and he’s called her enough in the night over the last few years that she can read his mood and thoughts in the way he lands on a word or in the spaces where he chooses to breathe. 

She can hear the slight shake in his lungs and she knows it’s something big. 

And then he says. “It’s not just that he didn’t go to Harvard. He didn’t… go.”

“Go where?”

She can feel his grimace. “Anywhere.”

“ _ Harvey.  _ What the fuck!”

“Donna, you have no idea. This kid is something else all together. He knows every piece of law and precedence in existence. He’s got a photographic memory or something. And he’s sharp. He beat me.  _ Me _ . In his interview. Like it wasn’t shit.” 

“But he’s not a lawyer.”

“He’s passed the bar, and he’s smart as a whip, Donna.”

“But he’s not a lawyer.”

“He can do it. I promise you he can do this.”

She sighs. “Are you sure about this?”

“Hey. Have I ever been wrong before?” He thinks better of it, says, “don’t answer that.”

It’s insane. He’s  _ insane _ , and that’s not new. But something else is, and she’s trying to land on what it is. Harvey is cocky and arrogant and a selfish bastard and she can quite literally count on one hand the amount of people he’s ever stuck his neck out for, and all of them are related to him except for her. But now here’s this kid, and he’s just met him, and he’s taking a huge risk. 

She wonders what’s changed. Something big has shaken loose in him, somehow, and she doesn’t know what it is. It’s uncomfortable, because she always knows. She’s made it her career, to know Harvey and how his soul fits his skin. She always sees him coming. But not this time, and so she wonders why and what.

She could ask him, but he probably hasn’t noticed. 

Harvey balks at her silence. He talks in the silences when he’s nervous. “Just… let’s just try it, okay?”

“So you’re not sure.”

“Fuck, I don’t know. But there’s something about him, Donna. I swear to God, he’s got what it takes. He’s smart, he thinks on his feet, he’s willing to work his ass off…”

“He’s got just enough risk around him that you can feel like you’re beating the odds every time you send an email,” Donna says. “Jesus, Harvey, just go to Atlantic City every now and then.”

She sighs. But there’s something else sitting alongside the exasperation and the worry for Harvey. 

The risk. The risk he’s taking. For some kid.

Maybe he’s … she doesn’t know. Changing. Growing. Maybe he’s having a nervous breakdown and has just decided to flame out in his career in the most spectacular way possible. She’s not sure. This is not a Harvey she knows well, at least not yet. 

Of course, he’s doing it in the most insane and risky way possible, but that Harvey she knows very well.

“Okay,” she says. “But if this comes out, I’m denying I knew anything. I’m not going to prison for you or that kid,” she says, and it’s a joke, but it also isn’t. 

Harvey is quiet for a moment before leaning into the joke. “Deal. I look better in orange anyway.”

Maybe there will be a moment in the future, she thinks, where this will all stop being rhetorical, where the chips really will be down and they’ll both find themselves staring down the barrel of a judge and jury. If it comes to that, Donna knows, she’ll be right there with him. There’s nothing else for it. She’ll chain herself to him as he sinks and go down with him. It’s inevitable because they’re so linked now that she’s stopped even trying to separate her from him when she looks into the future. It’s not a future where they’re together, because they don’t talk or think about that, but whenever she thinks ahead, he’s there in the periphery. She’ll be there, whatever happens. There’s no other way. 

But maybe, just maybe if he thinks she won’t be, he’ll be careful. So she lets him think she won’t hurl herself over the cliff with him, because that might be just enough to pull him back from toeing the edge. 

If he’s careful. She hopes to god he’ll be careful. 

She hangs up before he can fall asleep so she can lie in the dark and worry about Harvey and the way he walks the line between dark and light like his soul isn’t worthy of more. 

-

Sometimes, he calls when she’s not expecting it. Sometimes he mentions that he’s going out that night, to a gig or an event or on a date, and she tells him to have fun while she straightens his suit jacket and tweaks his hair until he gets fidgety and pouts about it. But then he’ll call at 9, or just after, and she’ll know that he hasn’t stayed out. Sometimes he hasn’t even gone out in the first place. Sometimes it’s because it’s an unexpected emergency at work and he’s calling her to complain while he perches on the arm of his couch and muffles his voice with pizza. Sometimes it’s because the gig he went to was bad enough that he didn’t want to stay, and he’ll chat away to her while he strolls home in the cool of the evening. 

Once, he called her, and it was 9:01pm, and he was already nearly home. 

“Hey,” Donna said. She was in bed, early and unashamed of it. It was winter, it was cold, and Donna had already spent too many winters in New York to be charmed enough by the snow blanketing the streets to ignore what a pain in the ass it is to exist around. Especially in heels. So she had knocked her snow covered shoes off in her entrance to dry in front of the radiator, wrapped herself in old sweats, replaced dinner with a bagel, and slid under her covers with a book and a cup of tea. 

“Hey.” 

“You’re home.”

“I am. Well, I’m getting there. Fucking snow.” 

She smiled into her phone. “I’m guessing the date didn’t go well.” 

“Not particularly. Bar she picked was shitty though, so probably for the best.” There’s a pause, and when he spoke again, it was through a mouthful of whatever he’d bought on the walk home. “Turns out, meeting someone this week and calling them by the name of the girl you’re meant to be meeting next week isn’t a great way to start the evening.”

He was joking, and this was something they’d joked about a hundred times before, but there was something else sitting there, a shabby tiredness to his voice as well. It crept in, every now and then, but it was coming through more and more as he’d called her through the years. 

“You’re going to have to start writing their names on your hand before you leave the office,” Donna said. “Though they might get suspicious if you have to check your palm every time you say her name.”

“Could be awkward during sex,” he agreed. She heard the tone of his voice change on his breath as he stepped in the elevator in his building lobby, and she heard his quiet sigh as the doors slid shut. 

That was Harvey, shifting his bones now that nobody was watching. She was getting familiar with that shift. 

“You okay?” she’d asked. 

“I … yeah, I’m okay.” 

“Harvey,” she said quietly. He was silent, and she’d waited, listening to the sounds of him unlocking his door and closing it behind him again. 

“Harvey.”

“Hold on. Need a drink.” She hears him shuck his coat and keys, hears the clinking of glass against countertop a moment later. 

“If you don’t want to talk about it we don’t have to,” Donna says carefully. This feels dangerous - Harvey talks to her about himself, about his hurt and his worry and his thinness, a lot, but they never acknowledge that’s what he’s doing. They hide it behind moonlight. They hide it behind the courage of midnight and whisky and coded language. 

Harvey’s never called and said ‘I need to talk’. He calls and asks her if she’s heard that new album from that band she likes, or throws film quotes at her and pretends to be disappointed when she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He calls to ask her if the navy suit goes better with a white shirt or a grey one. He calls to tell her some remembered memory of his father, which he always recounts softly, like he’s praying. 

Harvey calls to talk to her all the time. But he never calls to talk.

She thinks he believes that if he pretends they’re just chatting, like friends do, then they’re just friends who talk on the phone. And if they’re just friends then this isn’t anything, what they’re doing. Calling at midnight or 6am is just what friends do. And then he doesn’t have to admit this is… what? Therapy? Confession? Intimacy?

The silence after her words has stretched too long, and she’s just about to change the subject, when he speaks. 

“I just got her name totally wrong. And I didn’t even care.” He sounds like he’s surprised and disappointed in himself. “That’s … wrong, right? That’s fucked up.”

“Harvey, if you were both just wanting to enjoy a … night together, then that’s not necessarily a big deal. As long as you’re not misleading anyone, it doesn’t matter if you’re both just looking for something for the night.”

“But what if that’s not what I wanted? What if I was … hopeful? What if I was interested? Because I think I was interested, Donna, and I still couldn’t remember her name, and I just didn’t care. What is that?”

“It’s been a big week, Harvey. You’re tired.”

“I’m not that tired.” Then, so quietly it’s almost a whisper, he says, “Donna, why am I like this.” 

_ Oh Harvey _ , she thinks. Because he is. He is so tired, and she’s so tired for him. He’s tired of the burden he’s thrown on himself, of woman after woman, night after night, of midnight cabs he calls for them and, for the mornings when they’ve been too drunk and too long in the sheets, of spare, fresh toothbrushes that seem like charm but feel like loneliness. And he’s tired of how all of it hurts him in the unconscious quiet of his marrow, because even though he’s honest with them he doesn’t seem to realise he’s not honest with himself. 

She doesn’t answer with those thoughts. She doesn’t answer with ‘Harvey, you just want someone to come home to’, because he genuinely doesn’t think that he does, even though she can feel the desperation for it shaking through every drink he knocks back to blur the face of whoever he’s with, so they all feel like they might be one person. She doesn’t say that, and she doesn’t say any of the other truths she could. 

She doesn’t say  _ because of your mother.  _

_ Because of your childhood.  _

_ Because of Scottie.  _

_ Because you’re scared.  _

_ Because of me. _

“I believe in you, Harvey,” she says instead.

He huffs. It’s not a laugh, not really. “Why.” 

She thinks for a moment, then she says, “you care when it matters. Cameron, your dad, your brother.” She waits for a moment before adding, “me. When it matters, you care. And when you care, you come through. Every time.”

“How have I come through for you, Donna? We can’t even…” He trails off, she can hear his jaw working, and she can almost hear him shrug. “You trust me too much,” he says.

“Okay, Harvey. If one day, you give me a good reason not to trust you, I promise to kick you in the shins and pull your ponytail.”

He laughs, softly. She hasn’t solved anything, but she loves his laugh, and that’s something. “Thanks, Donna.”

“You’re welcome. Now get it together. Nobody’s going to fuck you if you just call your secretary to cry about being a forgetful womaniser all the time.”

She uses the warmth of his chuckle to mask the pang of  _ if only _ that sits under her joke. 

He talks to her for hours that night, about Cameron and his dad and Marcus. He tells her about Marcus’ restaurant, and casually suggests he take her there one day, and he tells her about his dad’s music. The stories about Gordon are all stories she’s heard before, but that’s okay because Gordon sits like a low hum in Harvey’s memories, and that’s important, and besides, she loves hearing about him. Gordon was the one thing Harvey loved - still loves - without reservation or hesitation. 

It gives her hope that, one day, he’ll love someone else with the same unconscious ease.

She’s careful not to think about how there are parts of her she’s buried that want to know what it would be if that someone was her. 

He eventually falls asleep in his clothes lying on top of his comforter, and tonight she hangs up, because he forgot her name but still went to meet her, and it makes a hidden part of her wonder what else she needs to do. 

-

He calls the night that he found out she handed Jessica a bunch of files from the DA’s office. 

Donna answers but doesn’t say anything. Anxiety has been gnawing at her all afternoon.

“I’m mad at you,” he says, but he sounds curious more than anything else. He’s never known this side of her. But then, he’s never been quite as blindly reckless with his own future as he’s been the last few days. Desperate measures, she thinks. 

“I know,” she says. She doesn’t apologise. 

“You betrayed me.”

“I protected you.” 

“How is stealing from the DA’s office ‘protecting’ me?”

“You were in trouble.”

“Yeah, you said that already.”

“Because it’s true.” She waits, but he doesn’t say anything, and tension sits between them like winter. 

She can hear him turning his betrayal over in his chest. It’s in the way she can hear him pacing across his living room. She can’t see how he’s earned this from Harvey - earned this depth of loyalty that’s going to drag the foundations down around him. So she asks, “is he worth it?” because it’s a question that’s been chasing her, and probably him, long before Cameron had come for him outside the firm two days ago. 

It catches him off guard, she thinks, because it takes him a second to say, “he was my mentor.” But it sounds hollow, a tired and threadbare excuse, words like worn carpet under his feet. She wonders if he still believes it. It doesn’t sound like he does. “I owe him.”

“Harvey,” Donna says. “He had you. I spoke to Jessica. She said he was setting you up to take the fall. I couldn’t let that happen.” She doesn’t say exactly why, because what’s between her and Harvey is not just loyalty. It’s something else, and she’s too afraid to push that feeling into the light, and he’s oblivious anyway. Besides, she doesn’t know what it is she’d be pushing into the light. They’re not just friends, she thinks. Surely not, not anymore. But they’re not ‘that’, either. And she wonders how she could even begin to articulate what they are to Harvey when there isn’t even a word for it in the first place. 

“Well maybe that wasn’t your choice, Donna.” His voice is harsh and dipped in brittleness. “Just because you worked there didn’t give you the right to make this decision for me. This was  _ my _ fight.  _ My _ choice. And I would have stopped you. You’re lucky that I couldn’t -”

“ _ Harvey _ .” It’s harsh enough to stop the flow of frustration and rage he’s letting out.

“ _ What _ ?” 

There’s a pause. Even though he’s not there, even though it’s only phones and only his voice, she swears there’s a spark of something arcing that’s more than the anger between them, more than the resentful crack in his voice.

“Harvey.” She says it again, but this time she murmurs it into the silence, because he wants her to yell, so he can yell back. He doesn’t want to yell at her, specifically, but Cameron isn’t there. He wants to yell at Cameron, but she’ll do. He’s not mad at her, not really. 

She’s just safe. 

He wants curses, and accusations, because he knows what to do with those. He’s been doing it this way for so long. Too long. Since she’s known him, he’s fought with fire, and gunpowder, and a loud righteousness that kicks his shoulders against his neck. There’s fire she can hear boiling, brewing in his chest and under his vocal chords as he tries to find a way to justify hurling himself into the fray like a martyr. 

So Donna is quiet when she says his name, and it short circuits all of it. He pauses, unsure, sitting in the silence, and then he sighs. “I really do hate it when you do that.” 

“I know.” She stretches her legs out under her sheets and hikes the comforter up against the cool of the evening. She wishes he was there, she thinks. She wants to gauge him, gauge the tautness in his shoulders and read his confusion in the tilt of his head. She can’t, so she says, “I’m worried about you.” 

“Don’t worry about me,” he says, but there’s no conviction to it, and she knows he’s worried too. 

“Harvey -”

“I panicked,” he says. “I never even thought that you’d… I just never thought you wouldn’t be straight with me.”

He doesn’t talk like this often. He’s musing, and he’s hurt more than he’s angry. 

She doesn’t know how to tell him she can love him more than he can hate her, and if it came to it, if it was the only thing she could do to protect him, she’d throw all of this. The calls, the work, the way he leans in and smiles at her, just sometimes, like there’s nobody else in the world. She’d throw it all away for him. Even if it meant tearing open the doors to a world where he can’t trust her. 

She’d do it. She wouldn’t even have to think twice. Because he needs her. 

“I don’t want to be mad at you,” he says, walking into her drifting imagination.

“Then don’t be.”

“It’s not that easy.” 

She almost laughs at that. “Harvey, if you only knew.” If only he knew how often she’d traced anger underneath her breath at him, frustration pinching tight in the corners of her eyes, and fought with all her heart for him anyway. 

“Knew what?” 

She smiles. “That you’re an idiot.”

“Oh, that. I knew  _ that _ .” He’s silent for a moment, dredging up some half buried memory that makes him chuckle. “Hey, remember when Malik got in a shit with me because Cameron wouldn’t let him handle that corruption case he assigned to me and we moved all his files into the ladies bathroom?”

“That wasn’t us. That was you, and I will claim the fifth if anyone asks.” 

And, a few hours later, after they’ve talked their way through their years at the DA’s office, and talked about cases and people, and haven’t talked about the other time, there’s a natural, quiet silence, and in that moment, Donna says quietly, “he wasn’t really your mentor, you know.”

“Cameron?”

“No.” She hesitates, and she’s not sure why. Maybe the words on her tongue are too close to things they don’t talk about. “You were always better than him. It just took him flying too close to the sun for you to see it.” 

“I’m still mad at you,” he says, but it doesn’t sound like it. It sounds like weariness, and it sounds like gratitude. 

“You’re welcome.” 

“Good night, Donna.”

“Good night, Harvey.”

-

“Rachel asked about us tonight. Asked if we’d ever.”

“Rachel is too curious for her own good.” She hears him stretching out. He’s on the couch, probably resting his glass on his chest and with his spare arm pillowed behind his ear like he does when they’re working late and he’s talking through potential closing statements with her. 

They’ve been talking for a while, about nothing of consequence. Harvey calls when he needs help but he also calls when he needs to distract himself. He hasn’t said anything tonight about work or women or his father, so Donna knows it’s distraction. He’s told her about playing baseball in high school and about Marcus’ kids and that they’re doing well in school. He dips into personal stories like they’re the easiest thing in the world, but he also hides himself so well that sometimes even she still can’t figure him out. He’s tangled up in the middle of all his courage and fear, a lot more than she thought he was a few years ago. 

The Rachel thing is distraction. But she also knows she’s testing the waters, just a little. 

“What did you say?” he asks. 

“I said we hadn’t.”

He’s quiet at that for a moment. “Any reason why?” he murmurs. 

“You know why, Harvey. We agreed never to talk about it. If I talk about it with Rachel then we’ll need to talk about it with each other. Besides, it was out of the blue and I didn’t really know what to say.”

“Best night of your life?”

She rolls her eyes and he must know she does because he huffs out a gravelled laugh before murmuring, “sorry,” while not sounding that sorry. 

“Careful, or next time she’s in your office I’ll let her play with your balls.”

“You didn’t let her near Bird, did you?”

“Of course not. I don’t want to get fired.”

He’s quiet for a moment and she can hear the low hum of the tv in the background. Harvey likes to keep the tv on when he’s feeling vulnerable and is itching with the need to be preoccupied. She doesn’t know why. Maybe he feels like all his thinness just bleeds into the background drama of whatever’s on and so what he says doesn’t really count. 

“If we aren’t going to talk about it, why’d you tell me Rachel asked?” 

She shrugs minutely. “I just… I lied to her. I don’t like that I lied to her. And I feel like if I tell someone the truth then - I don’t know. If it’s not a secret then it feels like I’m being honest, even if it’s not with Rachel. And you already know. So.” She pauses, tries to figure out how to summarise the knot in her stomach. “I just wanted to tell someone.” 

It’s not eloquent, and normally she’d feel embarrassed. Donna doesn’t struggle for words. But it’s Harvey. And he’s different. Always has been. 

He thinks about that, about her admitting she wanted to tell someone, and she can hear his mood shift in the way his breathing slows and deepens. He’s got a brain that goes one hundred miles an hour, and a resting heart rate to match, but he has a way of stilling everything around him when he goes quiet.

Maybe that’s just her though. He’s always taken up the whole room. 

Eventually, he says, “this show is stupid.” 

“Yeah?” She almost pushes him, almost asks him what he thinks, but there’s something in the deflection, in the way he murmurs absentmindedly, that means he’s already turning them over in his head. 

“I mean, it’s fine. It’s just these two characters. They keep almost getting together but they never quite get there because they’re afraid they’re going to screw it up if they do.”

“Sounds frustrating.” 

“They never say anything to each other. They just stare at each other like fucking teenagers and pretend to be friends. It’s been years and they just keep circling each other like idiots.”

He’s quiet, then, for a moment. And then he murmurs, “stupid.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. But she thinks,  _ maybe. Please, maybe. _

The pause is just long enough, and she says, “Harvey, I need to -“

He interrupts, gentle but firm. “Good night, Donna.”

She wants to shake her head and sigh, but she doesn’t, because she’s not sure what else she should have expected. She hates herself for expecting it anyway. 

“Good night, Harvey,” she says, and it’s just habit that she doesn’t hang up, because he usually falls asleep first. 

And in the oxygen between them, he takes a breath, and says quietly, “sometimes I wish we could talk about it,” and he’s never sounded more like he wished everything was different.

She breathes out, and it’s a sigh, half exhaustion and half wishing she could reach through the phone and grab his hand, and she murmurs, “me too.”

He hangs up. 

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm an author who resolutely says they are bad at multichapter fics. So here I am, starting another multi chapter. I apologise in advance. Thank you to Aditi who proofread so I wouldn't have to and yanked some moments into the sun that might have otherwise been hidden.
> 
> As always, your comments and reviews mean the world.


	3. Season 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of risks and rewards and running.
> 
> Thanks for reading - please take the time to check my author notes at the end x

They’re already half an hour deep into a call and Harvey has spoken about everything he can think of, but he hasn’t talked about a single thing that means anything or that might require him admitting to feeling anything, and Donna knows that means he’s feeling far too much and isn’t sure what to do with it. So he’s halfway done laughing his way through whatever torture he’d devised to put Louis through this week when Donna interrupts. 

“Harvey, what’s going on?”

Harvey pauses on the other end of the line. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you called me, and you never call just to talk, but you’ve done nothing but do the equivalent of asking me about the weather and sports. Which means either something has happened and you don’t know how to talk about it, or something has happened and you’re afraid to talk about it. So. What is it, Harvey?”

“Nothing’s happened.”

“Harvey.”

He sighs. “I mean, it really is nothing. Mike said some stuff to me in the file room. This whole Rachel thing is just... I told him he had time to find the right girl, he told me I’m a selfish asshole and that I’ll probably die alone, and it threw me a bit.” There’s a tone to his words she doesn’t hear much from him. He sounds like it’s bothered him, and he sounds like he’s confused that it’s bothered him. 

“He’s wrong, Harvey. He’s just angry and you were the one who pointed out the obvious to him, and you’re one of the only people that knows his secret, so it makes sense he’d vent his frustrations at you.”

“Yeah. I guess.” She hears the low bump of ceramic on marble as he refills his cup. Tea; he used to drink coffee in the evenings where he didn’t want whisky and wanted to talk, but after one too many texts from him at 2am complaining about the Greatest Race reruns he was watching, she’d made him switch. 

He still adds vanilla. 

“Mike said you spoke to him as well,” Harvey says. “About Rachel.”

“Yeah, I did. I don’t think he realised the knife edge he’s walking on.”

“Did he call you a lonely bachelor as well?”

“Please, that boy is terrified of me,” she says. “But he wasn’t happy with me either.”

“He’s young. He thinks he’s in love and he thinks he’s invincible,” Harvey says, wearing his usual unconscious clarity like a second skin. Donna wonders how he can so effortlessly walk the line of understanding nearly everyone around him and still be so unaware of himself. He skims over life, playing the man like he invented the concept, grinning all the while like God gave him a manual and told him an inside joke, and somehow still completely sidestepping the most basic of his own personal revelations. 

And her. Harvey misses her with such regularity she occasionally thinks it’s intentional. It hurts, and Donna has to push away those thoughts often enough that it sometimes feels like pain is a muscle memory, and how is it that he can look in Mike’s eyes and know him so completely, and then look in hers and think _friend_. 

Sometimes, she thinks it’s because of her rule. But Harvey keeps exactly zero rules that he isn’t planning on keeping anyway. If he thought her rule was worth breaking, he would have. Every now and then, he pauses, or says something in just the right way, and that makes her think _maybe_ . Maybe he does lay awake at night the way she does, just every now and then, thinking if he should call the way she wonders if she should call. Wonders what would happen if one of them called and said _fuck it be mine_. 

She wonders and she tries not to. 

“What did you tell him?” Harvey asks, and Donna tucks her wondering away. 

“Oh, I told him about your office, that you’d made yourself a package deal. Seemed to wake him up a bit. He asked me how he's meant to work with someone he has feelings for.”

“... what did you say?” Harvey’s voice is unreadable, but she thinks it’s the closest he’s ever got to what she’d call wistful.

“I told him feelings just go away,” she says. 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“...liar.”

Donna lets a long breath out instead of agreeing, and there’s an uncomfortable pause before she says, “I should go.”

Harvey says, “bye, Donna,” but she hangs up without responding, because her lungs are too small for the words. 

-

“Hey.”

“Hi.”

“You okay? What happened with Allison?” He’s either truly out of the loop, or he’s pretending he didn’t already shout at her in the bathroom, or both. It doesn’t really matter; he’s just trying to avoid it all together either way, avoid the emotions boiling close to the surface that had nothing to do with memos and paper shredders, and she thinks, _you coward_. 

“You already know, Harvey,” she says, and her voice is somehow all bite and complete exhaustion all at once. “The whole thing is a complete mess. Allison came after me. She cornered me and she sucker punched me. I was just trying to do my job and she came at me like I’m just some criminal. It was fucking terrifying. And I could have especially done without my boss hunting me down and tearing strips off me in the bathroom immediately after that.” She’s edgy, and tense, and not especially keen to deal with his particular brand of studied emotional obliviousness this evening. 

“Yeah,” he says, quietly, and for once he’s not pushing his ego out to match her hurt, and that deflates her a little. “I’ve heard your boss feels bad about that.”

“Well I fucked up. He was right. I deserved it.”

“Listen, Donna -”

“Allison implied that we’re fucking,” she says. She’d said it in the bathroom. Sort of. With silence and hand waving. But the silence and the hand waving feels like it’s too easy for him to turn away from, and just once, she doesn’t want him to turn away from it. Because Donna has to live with it, all the time, and Harvey doesn’t.

She has to live with the assumptions, with the sideways looks and the sly comments, and fight back against the way her talent and skill gets buried under _there’s no way they aren’t_ . But Harvey glides through the halls and office and his whole damn life like it’s unfathomable anybody would even consider, for a second, he and Donna might be something. She needs him to know how hard it is. She needs him to know how much he’s wrapped up in _everything_. 

Mostly, she just wants to talk about it, and there’s literally nobody else. 

“I know. It was a shitty thing to do.”

“It was. But she still said it.”

“What do you care?” Harvey sounds genuinely confused. “Since when have you ever cared what other people think about you? About us? We are what we are, Donna. It doesn’t matter if other people don’t get it. It’s never going to get to the point where you have to testify. So, so what if she thinks we’re fucking.”

Donna thinks _Harvey, you of all people, should not be gloating about other people not getting what we are_ , but she says, “Because I’m human, Harvey. Because it threw me. Because she’s far from the first person to assume that. Because I’m scared. Because…” 

Because she doesn’t know if they are. 

The problem is, they’re starting to stumble. Just once, just that one time that both of them had gotten carried away and let things between them get out of hand had turned into twice, then turned into a handful of times, and the terrifying thing was, it was almost a pattern now. They’d managed, unspoken, because of fucking _course_ it was unspoken, to lay out ground rules for something they both pretend is unexpected and spontaneous and unforeseeable. 

Always only when they were both single, and only when one of both of them was only just single, because then it was easy to apply words like ‘rebound’ and ‘comfort’ to something that, if they were ever to be honest, was already way beyond either of those things. 

Always only on the phone, or sometimes on text. Because just touching in real life is overwhelming. Because the brush of a hand or the bump of a shoulder in the hallway feels like lighting matches near a powder keg. And because they both knew why Harvey had looked at her the way he had when she’d snapped _well_ _maybe you shouldn’t be my boss anymore_. They both know it’s not the first time he’s looked at her like that, and they know it won’t be the last. They both know their phones are fingers in a dike.

Always only late. Really late, past 1 am mostly. Then either of them could pretend sleep was stopping them from answering, though neither of them ever leaves the phone unanswered. 

They still flirt with strangers, and go out, collect numbers and date other people. If they don’t, they’re too close to what they probably are anyway. 

And, most importantly; they never, ever, talk about it. 

It’s dangerous. It’s uncomfortable. It’s maddening, and delicious, and relentlessly confusing. 

But then, so is he. 

“That’s not what this is,” Harvey says, just before her imagination drifts too much. 

“Isn’t it?” she asks, and it comes out more brittle than she’d thought it would. 

Jesus. Of all people, Harvey is probably the worst possible single human on the planet to stumble into a _so what are we anyway_ discussion with. 

“Look, I don’t really know what this is. But it’s not… mindless. And it hasn’t got anything to do with work. That’s… work. This is. Different.”

“Is it?” She hates how easily he can compartmentalise everything. But building walls has always come too easy for Harvey. He’s so good at building them he doesn’t notice how hard it is for Donna to keep up with her own. 

“Donna -”

“Are you going to fire me?”

He swallows so hard she can hear it through the phone and she wonders if he’s going to call out the left turn. She does it sometimes, as an escape hatch for them both. This time it’s escape too but it’s also annoyance. She knows he’s not going to say anything about them that means anything, anything that has any sense of clarity to it, because he’s scared or because he’s confused or because he’s genuinely oblivious - it doesn’t matter. 

“No,” he says, and she’s not sure if she’s relieved or pissed off that he’s going along with the subject change. She suspects she’s both. 

“Is Jessica?”

“...I don’t know.”

She blows a slow breath out between her cheeks. Her heart has been caught up in the base of her throat all day anyway. First the memo, and then Mike, and then the bathroom, and now her job, and Harvey’s uncertainty shoots a fresh spike of anxiety through her lungs. 

“You know I hate that I have to keep things from you,” Harvey says.

“I know.”

“Doesn’t seem to be any point anyway. You know everything.” 

He says that a lot.

“I do.” 

She says that a lot too, but this time it comes out more ironic than anything.

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Good night, Harvey.” 

“Donna -”

She hangs up. 

  
  


-

  
  


She’d declined to answer and walked away from him on the sidewalk while he called out after her, and it was the first time she’d ever done that. She’d told him no before, of course. She’d stood up to him and she’d changed his mind and explained him to himself a thousand times over. The reason they still worked together in the first place was because of her ability to slam folders and morality in front of him and yank his conscience into the foreground. Harvey wasn’t exactly unused to hearing ‘no’ _from_ her. 

But he was unused to her ‘no’ when it came _to_ her. 

With others she says no. She says no to his stupid decisions and his obliviousness and his reckless gambling with himself and with others. She says no to his bullheaded demands to throw other people under the bus and to his sulking requests to manipulate innocent people she knows to his will. 

But when it’s just her, when it’s just her and him and her own actions holding a knife edge to the throat of her own morals and career and night-whispered resolutions of _I will never_ , she says yes. Every time. 

Just… not this time. She’d finally said no when it was just her. And the feeling of that had thrown her, the half embarrassed pride she feels. It had flared up as she pressed away from him down the street and it felt wrong.

Because it was her fault. Not the lawsuit and the memo and Hardman coming after him. But she’d made it worse. She’d made it a lot worse. Because there are moments when it comes to Harvey when she can’t think straight, and the threat of him going to prison or getting disbarred is one of them. It was exactly why she had her goddamn rule. She’d known what the right thing to do was, instantly. She’d known it was a much bigger problem for Harvey than for her, bringing the memo forward. She’d known it wasn’t her career on the line, and that Harvey knew more than she did about the implications of that piece of paper being in her hand, and that she should have gone straight to him. 

But all she could think about was Harvey and what his face would look like if he got disbarred, or if they shuttered him inside handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit, and she panicked. 

Mostly, she was hurt he hadn’t called. Two weeks was the longest he’d gone without calling her since they’d settled into their routine after moving from the DA’s office. She doesn’t know what it means that she misses getting calls from him that didn’t have anything to do with work. Probably nothing good. 

She eventually walks back in her front door, after having wandered the streets of the city without getting a single thing on her to-do list done because she lost the afternoon thinking about his damn face. 

She pulls her phone, forgotten in all her daydreaming, as she drops her bag on the floor, and the lockscreen politely tells her she’s missed several calls from Harvey and has a message. 

“Oh, you finally remembered how to use your phone,” she says to herself as she unlocks it and pulls up the message. 

“Donna. It’s me… It’s Harvey. ” She can hear his embarrassment in the way his voice catches on the ridiculous decision to introduce himself. “I guess you’re not going to answer and I get it. I guess I didn’t realise how angry you are about this. Or how angry you are at me. So. I’m sorry about all of this. I know it’s a mess. I. Please think about the mock trial. I… it would mean a lot.”

He starts to sign off the call. He’s halfway through saying _I’ll talk to you later_ when he cuts his own sentence off and she can hear him take a shaky breath. 

And then, suddenly, it all comes out in a rush. 

“I’m not… handling this well. I’m stressed out and I’m distracted and I can’t sleep. It feels like I should be mad at you, but I’m not. Honestly, I don’t know how I feel about all of this. It’s a goddamn nightmare. It’s fucking selfish to not give a shit about the case and everyone else and to just be worried about how I’m doing, I know. But. You not being here isn’t working. I can’t get anything done. I just catch myself staring at your desk, and I know everything is important but I just can’t. Everything is piling up. I’m losing my mind without you here. I feel like I can’t trust my own decisions anymore because I don’t have you here to tell me when I’m being a fuck up. Jessica’s assigned me this temp and I hate him. It’s not his fault because he’s actually good, he knows what he’s doing and he’s trying really hard to get on my good side. But he changed the calendar and he codes my messages according to colour and I fucking _hate_ him. I don’t want to sound like … like this is just about me and I don’t think about how this is for you. Because I don’t. I - I worry about you.” It comes out like a question, like he’s not sure why he’s worried, or maybe he’s not sure if it’s okay for him to be worried. It’s probably both. 

He’s never said anything like this. Not out loud. Not with more than his eyes and the way his hands twitch towards her sometimes. She’s pretty sure she’s forgotten how to breathe, and she can feel her hand start to shudder the phone against her ear. She sits down, because her legs are suddenly heavy, as his message cracks through her. 

“I keep picking up the phone to call you, and I want to make sure you’re okay, and then I just … I fucking chicken out. Every time. Jessica told me it wasn’t a good idea to call, and … I don’t know, I guess I figured that was a convenient excuse. Because she’s wrong. I should have called. I should have. I miss you. I wish I could call and we could talk. I just… please let me know you’re okay. I know you’re not. But .. you know. I don’t know what we are most of the time. But. I need you. Please. I -”

He hangs up. 

Donna ends the call the fourth time the automated voice asks her if she wants to play it again. 

By the time she’s had enough wine to gather the mix of courage and recklessness she needs to call him back, it’s after 10pm and she’s not sure how relieved she is that he doesn’t answer. He’s probably out. Rachel has mentioned that he’s spending a lot of time out at casinos at the moment. 

She thinks about hanging up, but before he can decide Harvey’s voice has clicked off and the beep that starts the message recording has chirped against her ear. 

“Harvey, hi. I got your message. I understand. I know you want me at the mock trial, and I understand. I promise I do. But I can’t.”

She has to take a moment to swallow back a frustrated crack in her throat before she continues. 

“I know this is hard for you to understand and that it seems like a personal betrayal, but I promise you it isn’t. Sometimes it feels like you don’t understand that our worlds are different, Harvey. I know how you see me, I know you don’t think of me that way, but… you’re different. You see me differently to other people and you forget it’s not the same everywhere. You walk through those corridors every day and you’re a senior partner. You’re respected and feared and you forget that I’m not. Not in the same way. I’m a secretary. I’m a secretary who everyone keeps asking if I love you or not. If I come in… that’s what everyone will think, and it’ll be humiliating, Harvey. And I ... you know how I feel about you. You know I care about you. I’d take a bullet for you. But I can’t come in just to be humiliated. It’s not going to help you. It’s just going to hurt me. I’m sorry. I really am.” And as she hangs up, before she gives in to the speech lying at the back of her tongue, she says, “I miss you.” 

Harvey doesn’t call her back.

  
  


-

  
  


It’s the fifth anniversary, Harvey is out of the office for the day, and she’s left the message she always leaves for him when he’s on the train to Boston and she can’t quite keep herself from reaching out.

It’s the fifth time she’s called him on the anniversary of Gordon’s death. She calls him every year, because she knows if she doesn’t he won’t hear from anyone for the whole day - at least nobody he wants to hear from. She suspects Lily probably calls. She feels like it’s important Harvey hears from someone he’s willing to listen to, that someone reminds him there are people alive that care about him and worry about him and want the best for him. 

He loves his dad (she thinks the correct term is ‘loved’, but she’s always felt uncomfortable thinking of someone so important to Harvey in the past tense). He loves his dad so much that he hates thinking about him, because it’s too hard. Gordon always reminded Harvey that the why and the how were as important as the win. He balanced the coldness in Harvey by reminding him of his own warmth, and once he was gone, it felt like Harvey ran from that warmth like he ran from everything else that made his heart too raw.

Donna had seen it. She’d watched him slowly get harder over the last five years, throwing enough humour over the top of his brittleness to fool just about everyone else. He hadn’t fooled her, because of course she hadn’t, and he looks at her sometimes and they both know she’s not fooled, but there’s just enough pain behind the slow blink of his eyes for her to let it go. 

It’s always the worst part of her week, watching him run so far from who he could be just because it hurts him too much to think about how who he could be is who Gordon wanted him to be. 

She’d said to him once, when they’d snapped at each other in his office as he’d prepared to manipulate a client into a huge loss through exploiting a legal technicality, “is this what Gordon would have wanted for you?”

He’d stared, silent and harsh, at her, and said, “Donna, get back to work.” And when she’d said that he _was_ her work, he’d frowned and looked back to his laptop instead of answering, sitting in sulking silence until she’d rolled her eyes and walked back to her desk. 

He’d mumbled a sullen but genuine ‘sorry’ on his way home that evening. They both knew when he was being unreasonable.

But it’s changed, just a little, since Mike conned his way into that interview room, and not just because he gives Harvey the constant thrill of potential chaos that he used to find by gambling and taking huge risks in his work and in how he treats people.

There’s that a shift in him peeking through. It’s not consistent. It’s not expected. It’s not even normal - it’s still unusual enough that it surprises her when he lets it to the surface. He’s still Harvey, all pride and swagger, as simultaneously impenetrable and fragile as blown glass, joking with her and winking and proposing marriage and utterly unaware at the growing sting of that running gag. His eyes are still his eyes and he still looks like he knows something nobody else does and doesn’t feel like sharing it with anyone. He still looks out at the world like he’s enjoying it but like he’s not quite part of it. 

But every now and then he’s started to bury a kernel of affection in the mockery. Mike will screw up and Harvey will call him an idiot in the same breath that he gently nudges him towards the right answer. Mike will ask a question he wouldn’t have asked if he’d actually spent any time at Harvard, and Harvey will roll his eyes but tell him the answer, or at least shove him towards the library and the right place to find it. Mike will let his emotion and compassion get the better of him, and Harvey will tell him why compassion is clouding his judgement and call him weak while shunting aside his own callousness just a little to make space for Mike to care. 

There’s times where she has to tuck away a pinch of resentment at the way Mike seems to have unlocked him. She’s spent years yanking Harvey away from the worst of his constructed narcissism, pulling him aside and challenging him and sometimes outright shoving him into the light and out of the darkness, and in her longest nights she’d genuinely worried he’d go down the same path as Daniel or Cameron. There were days where he’d started to fall into letting the grey get a little too close to the line, where his conversations with her had started to get tense and fragile and nearer to _I’m here and you’re here_ than her self respect was comfortable with. Donna was very aware of the fact that had all started when she’d stood shaking in his office and told him his dad was gone. 

How he is with Mike is a shift, only a few degrees, towards the Harvey that Gordon had an unflagging belief in and away from the Harvey he’s found himself to be the last few years - the one that he and Donna both pretend isn’t wildly different . Nobody else has noticed, but Donna has. Harvey thinks the world of his father, and Mike, she thinks, is some kind of loose, meandering pathway to pull his own heart closer to where his fathers’ sat. 

And so it colours her message when she calls, and tells him she misses his father, and doesn’t tell him she misses him. 

“Hey,” she says quietly in answer to the beep that chimes out after his voice.. She’s folded herself away in the corner of his office, perched in between two of his basketballs and worrying her thumb along the hem of her dress. “I hope everything is going okay. I know this is a tough day. Look after yourself. Give my best to Gordon for me. Tell him I miss him. I’ll talk to you when you get back in the office. Text me when you’re home safe.”

It’s the fifth time she’s called him on the anniversary of Gordon’s death. 

It’s the first time he calls back. 

It’s not late when he does. It’s not even 9pm, and so she starts when the phone goes off in her hand, and her “Harvey, hi,” comes out equal parts surprise and concern. “Are you okay? Do you need something?”

“No, I’m okay. I got your message and… I thought I’d call.”

“Where are you? Are you on the train back?”

“Yeah. It’s a pretty quiet carriage so there’s not many people, and… I just thought I’d call.” He repeats himself when he isn’t quite ready to say the thing sitting on the tip of his tongue. “Are you out?”

“Not tonight,” Donna says. She almost did; almost went out with Rachel, feeling the itch for distraction from the chronic niggle of worry over him that had embedded itself in the back of her mind that morning. She’s always hated that worry. It feels way too much like the way she worries over boyfriends. So she’d almost said yes when Rachel asked her, to prove to herself that she didn’t put him first every time, even when he wasn’t asking. 

But he might call, she thought, not entirely consciously. He might need her. 

She’s not sure if she’s proud to have been proven right or if she’s frustrated at how easily she lets go of the things she wants for the things he might need. 

“How are you?” she asks. 

“I’m… ah. I don’t know. Tired, I guess.” 

“It’s a long day,” she says. She knows the long day is not why he’s tired but she also knows the tone in his voice where he’d rather have an escape than a confrontation.

“Yeah,” he says. 

She lets the silence settle for a moment, because she can read it and him so easily, then says, “it’s okay not to know quite how to feel today, you know. Or to feel a bunch of different things that don’t seem like they should go together.” 

“Yeah. Thanks.” He doesn’t elaborate and his voice is slightly muffled; he’s probably shunted himself in between the wall and the seat in an uncomfortable attempt to stretch his frame out and relax. 

“Tell me about today,” she says, settling down onto her couch. 

“I had a drink. With dad. It was nice.” She imagines him playing with the cuff of his shirt. “Did I ever tell you about how he gave me my first drink?”

“I’m assuming you weren’t quite 21 when he did.”

Harvey laughs lightly, low enough for it to be half-lost under the rumble of the train. “I was fifteen. He’d gotten home late from a gig. I was still up, I can’t remember why. Probably school work or some shitty movie I was trying to catch on a late night rerun. Marcus and Lily were asleep, and dad got home and I thought he was going to ream me out for being up past midnight on a school night. But he didn’t. One of his buddies had given him this bottle of whisky, this Macallan. We’d never have been able to afford a bottle like that. Dad only ever had the shitty blended stuff. Some rich booking agent had given it to his friend and he didn’t like it, so he passed it onto my dad. You should have seen him, he was so smug about it.” He starts to laugh, but she can hear the breath cracking at the back of his vocal chords and it sounds more like sadness. “So he gets home and I’m thinking I’m going to catch it, but he drops his sax in the corner and sits down next to me with two of these glasses he kept for special occasions. You know those fake crystal tumblers? Those things. Heavy, cheap, cut glass fucking things. I thought they were so luxurious. Anyway my dad sits down with this bottle of whisky he’d never be able to afford and these two piece of shit glasses and poured us both a drink and said ‘tonight, Harvey, you and I are going to live like kings’. And we just sat and talked and drank and I thought I was a full grown goddamned man.” Harvey stops for a moment and his voice is thick when he says. “I’ll never forget that.” 

“He was a wonderful father, Harvey.”

“He was.” He waits for a moment before saying, “I’m sorry you never met him in person. He really would have loved you. You’d have been as thick as thieves. The shit you two would have gotten up to.”

“Oh Harvey, you have no idea of the shit we got up to anyway.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. I’ll tell you one day, when I can’t be professionally reprimanded for it.”

He laughs, then waits, then says, “I miss him.”

“I know. I miss him too.”

“Yeah, well. I better go. I have some emails to catch up on while I have a moment.”

“Text me if you need anything.”

“I will. Good night, Donna. And thanks. Thanks for… thanks.”

“You’re welcome, Harvey.”

For his birthday that year, Donna buys him a replacement bottle of Macallan 18 and two vintage tumblers in cut crystal, and Harvey stares at them for a long moment before murmuring ‘thank you’ in a voice that’s mostly water, and he tucks them carefully onto the shelf in his office furthest away from the drinks cart and only uses them on special occasions. 

  
  


-

  
  


They’d kissed after the champagne.

Neither of them drink champagne much - Harvey is more partial to spirits and Donna prefers wine, and there’s something about the particular construction of champagne that always goes to both of their heads. The carbonation kicks Donna in the back of the throat, and the flavour of it is so light that Harvey forgets he’s drinking in the first place. Normally they both pick something different if they can, but they’re not at an open bar or a restaurant, they’re just in his office. So when Jessica saunters in with a relieved smile on her face and a chilled bottle in either hand, it’s too easy to get through most of it without stopping to notice the room getting slightly less steady as the minutes progress. 

And at some point, he starts looking at her. 

He’s still laughing with Jessica, and chatting through strategy for next steps for the firm now Hardman’s been ousted. He’s still joking about Mike, and Louis, though the jokes about Louis have a slightly bitter edge to them. He’s still Harvey just like he always is, all confidence and bluster and with an ego so big he’s almost bursting out of his suit jacket, winking towards her while skating over the surface of thinking about anyone but himself.

But he’s looking at her. Sly glances over the rim of his champagne glass develop into him just openly staring while Jessica has her back turned to refresh her own drink, something harsh pooling behind his pupils, his chest taut and arms slack against his sides. 

She’s been holding her position behind his desk for most of the evening, at first because the heels she’d picked for her return to his office were killing her, but then mainly because it feels like the good-natured power play is arousing him and the champagne is making the danger of that much more attractive then she feels like it should.

There’s a moment, when Jessica has turned away again, and Donna has her feet up on his desk, crossed at the ankles, and he’s staring, and she quirks an eyebrow at him. It’s an invitation to smile or laugh, or make a joke, and break the tension that’s been brewing between them the whole evening. 

He doesn’t. He just looks at her like he’s reminding himself of what she looks like without her dress on, his eyes serious and hooded, and in that moment, she knows that it’s coming. 

He simmers under his smile for the next hour, until Jessica announces she’s going on to a restaurant and Donna and Harvey both decline, Donna because she’s feeling happy and shabby and pleasantly buzzed. Harvey says no, she thinks, because she did. 

They say goodbye to Jessica as she climbs into a cab, and Donna says she’s going to walk home, because it’s a nice evening and her place isn’t that far. Harvey, loosening his tie and scrubbing his hand through his hair, invites himself to join her, and they laugh their way through streets that are quieter than normal for the time of year it is, Donna with her arm slid through the crook of his elbow. 

And then, in her doorway, with Donna leaning back against the doorframe, she smiles up at him, and he’s looking not like he usually looks. He’s loose and unkempt with his tie slack around his neck and a couple of buttons that he’s worked loose, and he looks almost exactly like that one time she caught him high in his office on a Friday night. He’s got just enough height on her that he can press his forearm against the stone edge of the entrance, lean in and smile into her and goddamn if he doesn’t look exactly like every late night fantasy about him she’s ever had. 

They’re both tired enough that the danger and stupidity of the moment doesn’t occur to either of them and they’re both still giggling from the last of the champagne and from some stupid joke she’s made when she tugs his tie a little in invitation, and he bumps his mouth into hers and kisses his easy smile deep into her soul. 

His smile hangs on to hers as they both let their eyes fall shut and he moves his mouth against hers, just a bit of his weight falling against her instead of the entrance, and when he nudges his tongue against hers lightly, she thinks that if this had been a first date it would have been the perfect first kiss in the world. She tilts her chin up to him, finds his bottom lip in between both of hers, and sucks lightly. 

He pulls back after a long, languid moment, and his smile sits against her mouth, and when she opens her eyes again he’s looking at her like he knows what tenderness is. 

He murmurs, “Goodnight, Donna,” and looks at her like she’s going to fuel his thoughts for the rest of the evening. He leans back, flashes the brightest smile she thinks she’s seen on him, and watches him stroll away with his hands in his pockets, looking for all the world like he owns the city. 

He texts later, _home safe x._

The next morning, she finds a message from Zoe.

She buries the sting of it in teasing, and she thinks he does the same, and a wall goes up between them after that, in the office and on the phone. 

-

  
  


He calls one night, after Zoe has left New York to look after her niece and nurse her brother through his final days. They’ve talked about it, a little. It hasn’t been much, because the closer Harvey gets to his feelings the further he gets from his words.

Harvey isn’t the only person who finds consolation in pretending nothing affects him. Donna frets about him at night and on the weekends, but during the week and in the office, pretending he’s invincible is a comfort blanket. It had been difficult, seeing how much this had shifted him. The temptation towards jealousy she’d felt at seeing how sullen and withdrawn he’d been had given way to concern because he was genuinely beaten down by it and she thinks maybe this is changing him. And finding him, slumped and hostile in his chair, after laying into Mike like he’d just done something Louis would have done, seeing him actually lay out his hurt and confusion is … worrying. 

So when he calls, she’s relieved, because at least he’s reaching out, even though she knows he’s not going to talk about it when she answers the phone. He’d already talked about it as much as he could. 

“Harvey, hi.” Her voice is soft and compassionate. She’s been using that voice with him a lot, lately. 

“Hey.” She feels him trying to figure out how much he wants to give away, and after a moment, he says simply, “I couldn’t sleep.”

She glances across at the clock on her bedside table. It’s late, and she guesses he’s probably been trying to sleep for several hours. It’s after 1am, and she wonders if he’s guessed by the lack of drowsiness in her tone that she’s been lying awake worrying for him. 

Probably not. Harvey’s ego knows no bounds but he doesn’t seem capable of grasping that people think about him as a human as well as a lawyer. She settles back into her pillows, drapes her arm across her stomach, and thinks hard about not letting her voice crack on his behalf.

“Thinking about Zoe?” she asks, when she’s reasonably sure of her own vocal chords

“...yeah.”

“Did you want to talk about it?” 

“I. No.”

“Okay.”

There’s a long pause before he says, “I just couldn’t sleep.”

His voice is clipped, frustrated at the emotion hovering that he doesn’t understand and can’t name. But she knows. He just needs not to be alone. 

They sit in the silence and the safety of moonlight and listen to each other breathe for a while. She puts her phone on speaker, and leaves the call open, dropping it on the mattress next to her pillows and shifting back under the comforter. 

Eventually, Harvey says, “Well, I…”

Donna smiles sadly for him. “Good night, Harvey,” she says.

“Good night, Donna.”

She waits until she hears him even out from fitful breathing and shifting against his bed, and when she’s pretty sure he’s asleep, she lets herself drift off. 

When she wakes up the next morning, the call’s been ended, and Harvey’s number has flashed up a text saying _thanks._

  
  
  


-

  
  


“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Are you fat?”

“Working on it. Are you drunk?”

“Getting there.”

She’s where she was last year, and the year before that, tucked up in front of her parents’ fireplace with her dad’s sweats on and her legs folded up in front of her in the quiet warmth of the fireplace. She’s been half reading and half waiting for his call, and she ignores both the waiting and the slight flutter of at? his name on her screen when it flashes up.

“So,” he says. 

“So.”

Harvey blows a dramatic breath out into the receiver. “Jesus. What a fucking year.”

She laughs. “What a fucking year.” 

“It really kicked our asses huh.”

“It really did. You’ll kick its ass right back next year.” 

“Mmm.”

They sit in the quiet for long moments. Donna flips through her book and Harvey pours himself another drink. They’re working back towards their quiet ease together. It’s taken a while, after Allison and Hardman and Zoe. But it’s returning, slow and steady - or as slow and steady as anything they ever embark on does. 

She’s half reading and half dozing, lulled by the nighttime crack and hum of the fire, when Harvey says her name. 

“Yeah?” she asks.

“I wanted to thank you. For this year. I… I really almost fucked it up for us both.” She can hear the words _I really almost lost you_ sitting underneath it.

“I said I’d take a bullet for you, Harvey, and I meant it. I’m not going anywhere. backspace I’ve got you. backspace Even when you’re being a goddamn lunatic.”

“I’ll try to be less crazy next year.” There’s a sparkle in that. _Flirt_ , she thinks. 

“Oh, don’t even try that on with me, Mr. Specter, we both know you’re lying. You and Mike bring out the absolute worst in each other.”

“Excuse me, who went and got themselves fired this year?”

“Fuck you,” she says, and laughs, and so does he.

“Fuck you too.”

That shifts something, and normality suddenly breaks through whatever lingering walls had thrown themselves up between them over the year. They talk, about shows she’s seen that he hasn’t, and about movies he’s seen that she hasn’t. They talk about the year been and the year coming, trading bittersweet memories for future maybes that feel like promise. They’re kids again, scrapping the in DA’s office and talking a language only they understand, all lightness and the kind of flirting not burdened down by questions of bosses and secretaries, by firings and by both of them trying to figure out who’s the more reckless in throwing themselves on train tracks for the other. 

They’re just them. 

She goes to bed in the attic with his breath in her ear and thinks, I’m definitely in trouble. 

Years later, she will look back on that thanksgiving and think, you had no idea. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: 
> 
> On this timing: This is a very weird time to be writing about fictional characters. Racial inequality is, depressingly, nothing new. Like many other white people, I am both furious at my own history and caught between the pull of hopelessness and frustration. 
> 
> I am and have been fortunate enough to be able to use my spare time and money to be active in the push back against systemic racism in my real life for a while now. I'd ask you, if you haven't, to consider doing the same. It is not enough to consider racism as an individual problem to avoid. It is an institutional problem we must rage and war against. It is not enough to be personally non-racist. We must be collectively anti-racist. Non-racism is silent and comfortable. Anti-racism is loud and uncomfortable. And I promise you, we can change things if we are willing to be uncomfortable. 
> 
> I cannot provide links, but if you would like to be more active in this fight, or donate, or just learn (it is never too late to decide to be uncomfortable in your own personal development), please DM me. I'm here to talk. 
> 
> On this chapter:
> 
> Thank you to the people who encouraged, and championed my on the way to getting this chapter done, which I really struggled with. You know who you are - everyone who dropped an encouraging DM on Twitter, or gave advice and ideas, or cheered on my progress. Thank you all, and in particular to Aditi for the beta and proof read. Reviews, as always, are deeply appreciated.


	4. Season 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Season 3. Of Scottie and Stephen and Stalling.

He calls late on the same day he tells her he doesn’t want to discuss Scottie.

He says, “I’m ready to talk about it now,” instead of saying hello. He has the muffled gruff he gets when he can’t sleep and he’s been plucking at his sheets for long minutes while he debates calling her. 

Donna’s been tidying, pottering, waiting on the lengthening night to dull her senses enough to fall into bed. She’s been on edge, lately, and she won’t say out loud why, even though they both know, and she’s sleeping less than she used to. She gathers the cup of tea she’s been absentmindedly nursing and leans her elbows against her kitchen counter. “Okay,” she says. “Talk.”

He doesn’t answer, and she can almost hear his brain working, trying to piece together some kind of sentence that will let him admit how twisted up he is without confessing to having any feelings at all. He usually manages it, at the office, or when they’re out having drinks. 

He never manages it on the phone with her. The gap in the air between them makes things too real for him, somehow. She’s realising, slowly, that it’s not that being on the phone instead of looking her in the eye that gives him the courage towards honesty but that it won’t let him do anything else. He’s quiet when his honesty gets in the way of his words. 

He’s quiet a lot on the phone. 

“Why’d you send her to London?” she asks eventually. 

“I’m sure you’re about to tell me.” It’s a stall hiding behind a joke, because he probably knows, deep down. He’s not as oblivious as he pretends. He knows why he picked London, why he pushed Scottie away and hid from the opportunity of having her sharing an office and a city with him. Donna does too, and she hates it, hates why he did it. She hates how much she hates it, and that’s a problem in itself. Donna doesn’t like spirals and bitterness and what-if. 

And yet. 

But he’s holding out ignorance, on purpose or not, and it’s probably somewhere in between, and so Donna says, “you’re scared.”

“Why would I be scared of Scottie?” he asks, and she hears him shift, rolling onto his side, probably. She wonders if it’s so he can face towards her apartment. She does that sometimes when she’s talking to him in the late night, shifting her body towards him even though he’s miles away. It still counts, she thinks, turning towards him. It means ...something. 

She feels like he probably knows she does it. 

She wonders if he knows she wakes up in the mornings now, pressed up against one side of the bed, like she’s saving space for him. She used to settle over the middle of the mattress, so she could let her arms slack out on either side, and she doesn’t do that now, and she wonders belatedly when that changed. 

She thinks about how the gap in her bed feels Harvey-shaped, and how he probably thinks the gap in his bed feels Scottie-shaped and not Donna-shaped, then she tucks that thought away, because he’s her friend and he’s grasping at his own soul, and she’s the one he’s always needed to nudge him in the right direction.

So she says, “you’re not scared of her, you’re scared of you,” and then, after a beat, says, “idiot.” She says it with a smile pushed into the word to hide the hurt of everything else. 

He’s silent. Again. She can feel the weight of him in the silence, the weight of his whole soul. 

Goddamn him, she thinks, and it’s not fair, but it still is. It’s just who he is, it’s just how he is, and it’s just what she thinks. 

“One day, you’re going to meet someone who feels different to other women, Harvey,” she says. She’ll be challenging, and fascinating, and terrifying. She’ll be everything you hoped for and nothing like you expected all at once. You’ll meet her, and you’ll know. Sooner or later, you’ll know. And then you’re going to want to run.”

“Why the hell would I want to run?” He sounds genuinely confused. He’s a complex man, she knows, sitting in the gap between overthinking and wanting everything to be simple. He’s not so much ignorant, she suspects, as he is hiding - throwing a stubborn witlessness over all the complication so that he doesn’t have to reconcile the parts of himself he holds out in the sunlight with the parts he hides. He does it so well, she thinks, that he doesn’t know he’s doing it. He’s denied his way into a genuine cluelessness, and if he wasn’t so busy being in love with Scottie - she thinks it’s probably love - she’d allow herself to think it was charming. 

“Because everyone has a part of them that wants to run when they meet the someone they could be with forever.”

He considers that, then asks, “but what do I do?”

Donna smiles, but she might be crying. “Don’t run.”

“You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”

“I’m not,” she says, but it’s automatic, and it comes out hollow and obvious. 

“Donna?”

“Good night, Harvey.” She puts the phone down before he can say anything else. 

\- 

Scottie’s slipped onto the scene, and he’s calling less. That’s normal. They both pull back a little when one or both of them are dating. They never talk about it, because if they did they’d have to admit that they pull back because what they’re doing isn’t friendship, not really, and it isn’t innocent. 

But he calls her when it’s about Mike. There’s nobody else he can talk to about it. And today was bad. Very bad. Harvey, sullen and spinning in his chair to stare out the window and chase his own thoughts through his brain wasn’t unusual. Harvey snapping at Mike isn’t unusual either. But Harvey flat out admitting to Mike that Louis and Gerard had them, telling Mike they’d been cornered, that there was no way out and that he’d failed; that was something Donna hadn’t seen before. 

Donna had ushered Mike out of Harvey’s office at that, running interference through the afternoon so that Harvey could sit and glower at nothing in particular, pacing between his desk and his shelves, refusing to answer his phone and thumbing through his records like they’d done him a personal injury. 

He leaves the office right on 7pm after spending most of the early evening drumming his fingers restlessly on his desk. He mutters, “good night,” at her as he stalks past her desk, but doesn’t linger for a conversation, doesn’t wink, doesn’t make a joke about her evening or ask if she’s got plans, and he doesn’t suggest a drink. 

Donna cancels the plans she had, goes straight home as well, and waits for the phone call. 

Her phone buzzes next to her at 9:01pm. 

“Hey,” he says when she answers. He’s got the low, stretched out tone he has when he’s slouched on his couch with his chin tucked against his chest and a hand tucked between the back of his head and the cushion. 

“Hey, Superman.” 

“Don’t.” But she can hear a smile slipping into his behind his words, in the way it softens the hard tension of his words.

“Stressed?” 

“You could say that.” It’s the odd half-resignation in his voice that worries her the most. At any other time, he wouldn’t be on the phone to her. He’d be out in the night, knocking down doors and browbeating people into doing what he needed. She has an image of him on these nights, these nights that happen when everything is frantic and knife-edge and they’re all staring over a cliff, and it’s not him lying on a couch waiting for fate to come for them. She’s seen him in the past, his frame so full of purpose and anger that it makes him seem taller, his shoulders wider, makes him vibrate with a dangerous energy that is terrifying and devastatingly attractive all at once. She has, more than once, been in the thick of it right alongside him, running interference and catching the details he’s missed in his rage against the unfairness of circumstances around him, and she’s had to give herself a stern talking to so that she can focus on the task at hand and not on the way his shoulder blades push up against the frame of his suit and how easily it would be for her to turn his anger into lust with a couple of well places glances and a whispered word against his cheek. 

Harvey, twitching with righteous anger and adrenaline and having to be held back from his most dangerous and risky instincts is something she knows well. 

Harvey doing the equivalent of waving a white flag at the circumstances around him is not. 

“Mike will think of something,” Donna says, and it sounds lame even to her ears. She’s usually telling Mike that Harvey will think of something, not the other way around, and the edge of placation in her tone sounds incredibly obvious and loud. 

“Louis has him cornered,” Harvey says. “Mike’s already tried, and he just made it worse. Gerard’s a stubborn bastard, so he’s a non-starter. The only way I see it changing is if Louis backs down. And… well, you know how Louis is.”

He doesn’t seem to consider the fact that Mike wouldn’t throw him under the bus. It probably doesn’t matter anyway, because Harvey has a reputation and there’s no way anybody investigating Mike would believe Harvey didn’t know exactly what was going on. So Harvey doesn’t say what they both know, what’s hovering in the air unspoken - that if Mike goes down, Harvey will probably go down. And if Harvey goes down, Donna will follow him. 

It’s not something they’ve ever discussed. It just is, like gravity and oxygen. Harvey and Donna are almost indistinguishable, and mostly that’s just a thing that is, a thing for people around them to observe and tease about, a thing that helps Donna know what Harvey’s thinking and what he needs. She’s his Girl Friday, and his right hand, and his shadow, and his conscience. She’s all the things that aren’t removable from a person. Harvey and Donna can’t extract themselves from each other anymore, not really. So if Harvey goes down, Donna will go with him, and he’ll fight it all the way, and it won’t matter. 

There’s no way she’ll let him throw himself into the abyss without her. 

They’re not talking about Mike’s future. They’re talking about theirs. 

“You think Louis will go through with it?” she asks. 

“From what Mike said, I don’t see him backing out.” He pauses, and she can feel him considering, and then he admits, “I’m scared, Donna.” 

“I know. Me too.” Normally she wouldn’t admit it, because normally one of them has to be the brave one. But they’re right on the edge. This time tomorrow they might be fine, or Mike might be gone, or Harvey might be naming Scottie as his lawyer, and Donna might be naming Jessica as hers. 

She hears the light rough of Harvey scrubbing his hand over his face. “Jesus, what are we going to do,” he says, and he mutters it so quietly that if he hadn’t said ‘we’ she would have thought she was talking to herself. 

“Talk to Louis.”

“And what? Throw myself at his mercy?”

“Yes. Louis is in love with you, Harvey. Go to him, be honest. He’ll bend more than you give him credit for.” 

He sighs heavily. The last thing he wants to do, she knows, is place his fate in the hands of anybody, let alone Louis, but, for better or worse, he’s found himself in the tightest corner imaginable. 

They’re silent for a long moment, and she hears him breathing, tries hard to tell how hard his heart is beating. 

After it’s been long enough that one of them would normally say goodbye, Harvey says, “Donna?”

“Mmm.”

“If this all goes south? Promise me you’ll pretend you don’t know.” He’s resigned; even as he says it she can tell he knows she’d never agree to it.

“Promise me you’ll make it so I don’t have to.”

“I can’t promise that.”

“I’m not hanging you out to dry, Harvey.”

“Goddammit, Donna.” Harvey’s tense, his voice taut, and she knows she’s just piling another worry on top of everything else, but she’s not going to lie to him and what else can she do? “I can’t worry about you on top of everything else.”

“I know. I know. I’m sorry.” Her throat is tight; she swallows around the waver. “But I can’t. I’m in this, Harvey, however it goes down. But I have faith in you.” 

“Donna -” 

“I can’t,” she says again, and she’s trying hard to keep her voice steady. “I  _ can’t _ .”

There’s a taut pause, and then Harvey breaks it with a sigh. “Okay,” he says, and she hears his voice catch in his throat. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Good night, Harvey.”

“Good night, Donna.”

She hangs up, and forgets to go to bed, and instead sits quietly on the couch until she dozes off. 

**-**

  
  


Ray’s just about to pull away when Donna leans forward in her seat and says, “Wait.” It’s one of those moments she has sometimes, when her body acts before her brain does, pulling action out of instinct. 

“Everything okay, Donna?” Ray asks. 

“Yeah,” Donna says, but it comes out sounding more like a question than anything. “Yeah, I - just feel like walking.”

If Ray’s confused or irritated by both of his clients bailing within a couple of minutes of each other, he doesn’t show it. “No problem,” he says. “Have a good night. You get home safe.”

It only takes her a block or so to catch up to Harvey. When he’s by himself and he’s not working, he dawdles, hands in pockets, looking for all the world like he owns the whole city. He watches people and taxis and scaffolding like there’s going to be a test on it and yet also manages to be completely in his own world. New York was built for Harvey Specter, for his eye for detail and for his daydreaming, for his sharp brain and his soft imaginings. 

Donna isn’t sure when she started thinking of Harvey and the city as if they’re an extension of each other, but she does. 

She sidesteps to him at a crosswalk, slips her arm through the crook of his elbow. “Hey. Going my way?”

Harvey glances, smiles a little too broadly, and if he’s surprised he doesn’t show it. “Seems like it. Gave Ray the night all to himself huh?”

Donna nods. “Just felt like walking as well.”

“So. Am I walking you home, or are you walking me home?”

“Let’s just see how we go.”

They’re silent for a minute, taking in the city around them. Donna’s adopted New York, it’s mannerisms and bustle and confrontation. Harvey seems to have been born into it. She honestly can’t imagine him fitting anywhere else. New York has that particular mix of standing out and blending in all at once and it’s the same line he walks. 

She’s quiet, contemplating him and the city, and it’s unlike her. He glances at her, and he’s just nearly the right height that she could lean her head against his shoulder if she wanted. She wonders if he’d say anything if she did. 

“So, you’re okay,” Harvey says. “After earlier.”

Donna shrugs minutely. “Honestly? I don’t think I’ll know how I am for a little while.” She flexes her fingers out against his jacket sleeve a little. They’re still shaking, just minutely, the last vestiges of adrenaline still twitching out through her bloodstream. She’s exhilarated, and grieving, and so, so tired. 

He nods at that, and his eyes crease around the edges. Maybe he’s concerned that she doesn’t, for once, seem to know exactly how she’s feeling, and how Harvey’s feeling, and everything in between. She feels like he presses his elbow into her a little more snugly but she’s not sure. “Where did you pick him up?” he asks. 

“He was at the bar of his hotel feeling sorry for himself. He was halfway through his martini.”

Harvey snorts derisively. He snorts whenever anybody drinks anything other than a single malt. “What kind of a grown man drinks martinis anyway.”

“James Bond?”

“Stephen is  _ not _ James Bond,” Harvey says, sounding offended. “Piece of shit.”

Donna laughs. She doesn’t think about how much she likes that he always manages to find a way to make her laugh when it’s really important. That’s the kind of fuzzy adoration that she feels should be reserved for lovers. “Walk me home,” she says. 

“That’s what the car was for.”

“Yeah.” She thinks about how much to say, and how to say it, and nothing feels adequate, it’s all too little ( _ I was bored _ ) or too much ( _ I need you with me _ ), and so she tips her head up to the lights to study them so it doesn’t matter when she starts “I don’t want to …” and trails off, because what she really wants to say is  _ be alone _ , but that sounds less like what it is, which is just sadness, and more like what it isn’t, which is an invitation. 

Harvey gives her a moment, then decides she’s not going to elaborate and finishes for her with a soft nod of understanding. “Yeah. I get it. Your place it is.”

“What a gallant gentleman.”

He nods, and she swears she can feel him cinch her arm a little tighter against his side. “Don’t tell anyone. I have a reputation of being a bastard, which I find works for me.”

He gives it a moment, a block or so of silence, before he says quietly, “you did the right thing, Donna.”

She’s not sure if he’s talking about stepping out with Stephen in the first place, or hauling him on the mat, or breaking up with him, or helping bring him in. Maybe it’s all of the above, she doesn’t know. Harvey tucks himself away when she’s with other people. She thinks it might be respect, or it might just be self preservation. 

“Yeah? Then why do I feel like shit?”

“Because revenge doesn’t suit you.”

“That wasn’t revenge,” Donna says, and she’s still not sure if he’s talking about this evening or her dating Stephen in the first place. 

“I know. But part of you wanted it to be.”

She looks at him, head cocked, and he looks like he’s beyond his years, the way he looks sometimes when he drops unexpected wisdom or insight into the conversation. He doesn’t do it often, because that’s her job, and Harvey seems to enjoy playing at obliviousness. He pretends at ignorance, like emotion and motivation is alien if it’s not the pursuit of power and money, and he’s got everyone fooled. Nearly. Donna sees through him like he’s glass. 

But she’s slowly realising he can do the same to her. 

“...you’re Donna-ing me,” she says, half-proud and half surprised.  _ Son of a bitch _ . 

He smiles wide, and she loves his smile. She’d forgotten. It feels like a while since he’s had cause to show it to her. “Learned from the best,” he says. 

“Harvey?”

“Mmm.”

“Why did Stephen bother you?”

He almost stops walking, but he’s still studying the lights and streets around them instead of looking at her. He avoids her gaze a lot, these days. He never used to. Maybe she’s too much, she thinks. Maybe she’s not enough. He never says either way. 

He hesitates long enough that she shakes her head a little.  _ Idiot _ . “You know what, don’t say it.”

He stops then, turns to her, and his eyes kick her right in the gut. He looks haunted, and hurt, and like he knows that it’s not fair on either of them for her to ask. He swallows, opens his mouth, and then looks almost like he’s scanned every word he knows and still can’t come up with the right combination that would give voice to… whatever it is they keep circling around and then running from. “Would it change anything if I did?” he asks, but it’s not really a question, because his eyes look the way they do when he already knows the answer.

Donna feels her mouth twitch in a sad half-smile. “No.”

He looks at his feet for a second, looking perversely disappointed and also mostly angry at himself for hoping this non-conversation might go differently to the thousands of other non-conversations they’ve had, the thousands of looks and sighs, of never-minds and don’t-worry and at the end of all of that, the helpless shrugs and  _ good nights _ said down the phone instead of  _ I need you  _ or  _ come over _ . 

Harvey nods, chews the inside of his lip for a moment, thinks better of something, and says, “come on. Let’s get you home.”

He’s mostly silent for the next handful of blocks until they pitch up to her front door, but he’s not quiet the way he normally is when they’ve touched too close to whatever they are and sprung back again. He steals glances at her, hints of smiles and wistfulness painting him still and almost serene in the dark and blurred lights. 

At Donna’s door, he doesn’t say goodnight like he normally does, flagging a cab down and watching for her to get on the elevator before he tells the driver his address. He’s not even looking at the street for a taxi. He’s looking at her. 

He’s lingering. 

She cocks her head to the side and smiles at him. “I’m safe now. You don’t have to walk me to my front door. I’m pretty sure I can make it to -”

“I kind of want to kiss you.”

_ Jesus. _

He’s stunning, tall and striking in a way she’s never really gotten used to, and he’s fixed his eyes on hers in a way he rarely does, where she feels like he’s looking right into the core of her being, like he’s suddenly discovered starlight inside of her. He’s leaning in, just a little, but it feels like he’s got his own field of gravity that’s hauling her in. 

She doesn’t say yes, but she can’t bring herself to say no, either. Because she wants to kiss him as well. This is one of those moments, one of those secret minutes they have sometimes, usually with two phones between them, when work is far enough away from them to forget it for a moment, and they flirt with honesty and with each other. Donna remembers with sharp relief ten years ago and how he’d flushed her body with kiss and touch; she remembers about a year ago when they’d drunk too much champagne and laughed and he’d kissed her and then dated Zoe. 

But tonight there’s no champagne, and it’s not ten years ago when they found a gap between work and girlfriends and boyfriends that let them fit in all their love and lust, and Donna’s smarting from Stephen, and Harvey probably is as well. 

And she knows that her backbone can’t take it, and if she lets him kiss her she’ll let him take her upstairs, let him make love to her or fuck her, she’s not sure which one, she can’t tell from the look in his eyes. And if she lets him love her or fuck her or whichever is sitting in his chest, then they’re both going to wake up the next morning with another problem to layer on top of the godawful year they’re both having. 

She doesn’t admit she’s terrified - of him, of the look in his eyes, of the fact she thinks it’s probably just fucking to him, and it wouldn’t be to her because honestly? She’s gone. She thinks she probably has been for a while. Stephen was a distraction and a fling, but he was also a test, to see if she could spend her evenings with someone and share her bed with them and not think of Harvey. 

The first time she’d been with Stephen, he’d been something else all together. She wasn’t kidding when she’d told Rachel she’d met her match. But she didn’t tell Rachel she still needed the thought of Harvey, of his weight on her and his breath in her ear, before she could fall apart. She’d lain awake far after Stephen had coasted into sleep, one singular thought circling her brain until she thought she might have a panic attack.

Harvey. 

She’s terrified to kiss him because she suspects it’ll break the dam holding back how far gone she is, and she’s also terrified because maybe, maybe it’s the same for Harvey, maybe he’s not thinking about fucking either, maybe he’s scared that he’s gone like she’s scared she’s gone, and if they admitted it, what then?

What the hell then?

She’s quiet for long enough that Harvey starts to lean in, his eyes dark and treacle and he smells like him, and it’s overwhelming. 

It takes the most self control she’s ever mustered to still him with her hand on his chest, and he stops but she’s not sure if it’s because she’s pressed him back a little or because the spark that jolts between them roots them both to the spot. 

Harvey looks confused, and hurt, and she’s pretty sure he has no idea how thin her resolve is. If he leaned in, she’d snap like glass.

“Good night, Harvey,” she says, and her voice is steady, but her hand isn’t. 

“Good night, Donna.”

Donna retreats to her apartment, her hands and legs shaking with adrenaline or emotion, she’s not sure which, and she sits quietly on her sofa and thinks about him for far, far too long. 

He texts her an hour or so after she closed the door on him.

_ Why’d you break your rule for him and not for me? _

She doesn’t know how to tell him the rule’s only for him because he’s something other than anyone else, so she doesn’t answer, and he doesn’t text again.

-

She tries hard to be happy for him when he pulls Scottie into the firm and into his bed. She helps with presents, and pep talks, and she stops responding to the flirting and the winks and the way Harvey dances with their lines and boundaries in a way that used to feel friendly but now just feels painful. Harvey looks hurt when she turns away from his innuendos and winking in-jokes, because he thinks they’re still part of the way they’re just friends, and Donna doesn’t say anything, because how can she? She knows they’re both being unfair. She’s drawn lines she keeps dragging Harvey over, or being dragged over by Harvey, blurring friendship and relationship and rules all together in a mess of texts and phone calls. Neither of them know what they are. Scottie, in a way, changes nothing, even as she changes anything. 

Scottie is a relief, in some ways, a clear line in sand, and she draws a box around Harvey that makes sense. 

Sometimes Harvey looks at her like he knows she’s using Scottie as an escape hatch, and he catches her with hooded eyes that would have stopped her in her tracks if she wasn’t focussing so hard on not thinking about him and the way he buries himself into her soul with those goddamn stares. 

So when he calls, a couple of weeks later, she’s out of practise, no longer used to waiting on his call, and it’s late. Very late. Her phone buzzing on her side table shakes her awake, and she answers out of instinct more than concern. 

“Harvey,” she says, her voice night-slurred and buried in irritation. “It’s 3am.”

“Why’d you break your rule for him and not for me?”

Donna rolls onto her back and pushes hair back from her forehead. She’s disorientated and it’s the last thing she’s expecting from him. “I - what?”

“Stephen. Why’d you break your rule for him and not for me?” His voice is dark, and unsteady, and she instinctively knows that he’s sitting by himself somewhere, soaking himself in whisky and brooding, and he probably has been since he finished up at the office for the evening. It takes Harvey a serious effort to get to the point where he’s obvious, and he’s slurring. 

“You already asked me that,” Donna says, and she lets her irritation show through.  _ Goddamn child _ . 

“You never answered.”

“I know.” She sits up and reaches for her light. It feels like too much of a betrayal to Scottie to lie in her bed in the dark and talk to her boyfriend about why she won’t sleep with him. The lamp casts the room in a too-bright glow. She hopes it makes this feel less like exactly what this is. “Harvey, have you been drinking?” 

He doesn’t answer. He’s consumed with his own questions and, like so often, he doesn’t seem to have the capacity to hold both his and hers in tension. “I’ve been wracking my brains. I can’t figure out what he has that I don’t.” He sounds halfway between furious and genuinely hurt, and she has no idea what the hell has happened that’s pushed him into whatever made him punch her name into his phone. 

“He was just a fling, Harvey.” She’s exhausted, physically and mentally, and she can feel it, feel that they’re both way too close to the edge for anything like this conversation. Even through the phone, the air is thick and taut between them, and it slips through her lungs with a tired, heavy sigh. Not for the first time, she’s grateful for the barrier between them, because if he’d shown up at her door with his anger thoroughly soaked in alcohol, it probably would have turned from talking to shouting, and then to one or both of them breaking their bodies against the other, Scottie bedamned or forgotten, and that would have been exactly the worst decision that both of them could have made, and they’d definitely have made it. 

“Bullshit,” Harvey snaps. “I saw how you looked at him. You … changed things for him. You dropped balls at work. You  _ never _ do that. Don’t tell me it was just a fling. You wanted it to be more than that.”

“He is a  _ murderer _ .”

“And if he wasn’t? If he was who you thought he was?”

She goes quiet when he says that. He’s sullen, but he’s right. She’d hoped. Whatever she’d thought at the start, whatever excuses she’d told herself and told Rachel, whatever complications came through when Harvey pushed his way into her space or into her imagination, she’d hoped. He’d been charming and funny, generous, and most importantly, he was present in all the ways Harvey wasn’t or couldn’t be. 

She tries to come up with a response, and she works her mouth around a bunch of thoughts, but she can’t voice any of them . Because Harvey is right, and Donna had hoped.

Harvey waits as long as he feels is fair, and then huffs, a humourless laugh he doesn’t do much because she hates it. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. White fucking picket fence and all, huh.”

“That’s not fair, Harvey.”

“Yeah, well, welcome to the party.”

“Hey,” she says, and it comes out sharp. He’s got a point, but he’s right at the edge of reasonable and he’s flirting hard with cruelty. “What the hell is this, Harvey? You’re with Scottie.”

“… yeah.”

“Then what the fuck even is this?” Because she doesn’t know. He’s trying with Scottie. He’s hopeless more than he succeeds, but he’s genuinely trying. He wants it to work with her. And Donna wants him to be happy, even if his happiness tears hers apart. “Scottie isn’t some girl you’ve picked up for a couple of weeks to distract yourself. You have a  _ girlfriend. _ A  _ serious _ girlfriend.”

“I  _ know _ .”

“Then what are we even talking about?”

“I don’t want to be -”

“Harvey.” She interrupts him, because she knows in her gut what the end of that sentence is, and if she lets him say it, if she lets him voice the thing that’s making the air between them thick, then it’ll be something neither of them can come back from. And Donna isn’t sure how she feels about Scottie, but she knows she’s worth more than whatever’s happening here.

“What.”

“Shut up.” 

She hangs up the phone and lies, awake and unhappy, until her alarm goes off, and when she gets to the office that morning, Harvey silently hands her a coffee and looks even worse off than she does. 

-

  
  


He calls one night, and she’s crying - over the year, and the hurt piled on top of all the shit they’ve gone through, and the sheer exhaustion of it all. Donna doesn’t mind complex but she doesn’t like complicated, and this year has twisted over and back on itself in a weird mix of highs and lows, of boredom and frustration and fear - for Harvey, for herself, for the firm. 

It’s a lot.

She can be blind, just like Harvey, and she knows she’s been hiding away from herself in an unconscious act of self-preservation when she watches some show or movie that would normally have her rolling her eyes at the saccharine or melodrama instead kicks her in the gut and snaps something open in her chest. It’s her body’s built in warning signal, the red flag that she’s not looking after herself. 

And so when the ridiculous flood of tears come towards the end of her hundredth half-noticed rewatch of Moulin Rouge, she lets herself sit in it as the credits roll. She lets herself feel all the twists and hurts and slights of the year, of the irony over the way she’s fought tooth-and-nail for him for years without him ever noticing but he somehow still has a laser vision for when she glances at another man. She feels the guilt of lust for someone she couldn’t read, who she misread so badly he’d killed people and she didn’t know. She feels it, the weight of falling for someone she shouldn’t have, the what-if of it all. She feels the hollow of finding herself going home alone, again, yet again, while Harvey goes home to Scottie, and she feels the shame in the corner of her heart that wanted him to be alone as well because then they could walk backwards again into the weird limbo they share of illicit glances and late night phone calls that start  _ what are you wearing _ and end with the cursing blunt of names over strained vocal chords. She feels the inadequacy of all of it, and the unfairness, and it’s awful. She cries for friendships and non-relationships and all the in-between of life. 

Mostly she’s crying about Stephen. It’s not that she’s not over him. She’s just realising that he’s highlighted maybe she’s not exactly who she thought she was and wanted to be. 

It’s in that moment Harvey calls, and she answers, but only manages to hum down the phone because she doesn’t trust her voice for anything stronger. 

“Donna?” Harvey says, and she tries to answer, but her chest is too loose and her throat is too tight nd she doesn’t know what she’d say anyway.

Harvey is someone who squirms in the face of outright emotion, but sometimes he surprises her, and tonight is one of those times. He sits, and he doesn’t say  _ what’s wrong  _ or  _ it’s okay _ out loud, but he’s just there while she’s quiet, then sniffs, and then when she just thinks  _ fuck it _ and lets herself hitch breaths and tears fall with the phone line open. 

He doesn’t placate her or ask her to calm down. He just lets her be, as she is, messy and unhappy and raw. 

“He’s a rat bastard,” Harvey says, after several minutes. It’s the only thing he says, and she doesn’t answer.

This time he sits on the phone with her until she falls asleep, and she wakes up to a text from him the next morning that says  _ you should probably stop watching musicals when everything’s going to shit _ and it’s the first thing that makes her smile all the way up to her eyes in several days. 

-

They nearly fuck on his desk a couple of minutes after he tells her that he’s not a good man and she’s being a good man for him. 

It’s heartbreaking to hear him say it, to watch him outwork the fragility of his ego and self esteem. He’s bluffing, hiding, trying to act like he’s okay and pretending they both don’t know he isn’t. He’s lost, and hurt, and she can see it in his eyes:

Everybody leaves. 

She tries to tell him in every way except saying it outright that she’s not going anywhere. 

He smiles at her, and it shakes something loose in her, something that tweaks low in her spine. 

He gets like this sometimes, looking at her like he wants to slam her into a wall and tear her clothes off. It’s usually at times like this, when the office is almost empty and the sounds of lawyers and interns bustling and shouting has been replaced by the quiet hum of air conditioners and overhead lighting, when the office feels like it’s settled into an evening hibernation. It feels like the walls themselves are promising to keep anything that happens secret, and they’re both tired and letting the tension that’s been simmering since he’s been trying to make it work with Scottie show on the surface. 

He’d never do anything, and neither would she. He’s with Scottie. She’s still smarting from Stephen. And they’re friends, and they’re not stupid. 

But sometimes, they stare, quiet and long and blatant, and if either one of them had the courage to breathe words into the air they might have even given voice to what’s sitting underneath.

So now, with Scottie gone and Stephen languishing in a cell somewhere, he smiles at her, perched on his desk as he leans forward in his armchair, and his smile doesn’t hit his eyes but something else does, something deep and lustful and secret, and the world goes quiet alongside the silent office, the lullaby hum of the air conditioner and lights hiding them both away. If it wasn’t incredibly dangerous, because it’s them, or inappropriate, because it’s his office, it might have even felt like what a normal couple would call romantic.

But it is dangerous, and inappropriate, so it doesn’t feel romantic. 

It feels like trouble. 

And it definitely feels like trouble when Harvey, unblinking and gaze locked, pushes up out of his chair towards her, and Donna doesn’t say anything, but she sits back on her hands at the same time he moves, that subtle-but-not body language she specialises in, opening her frame up to him. She feels her eyebrow raise up at him in challenge and invitation just a second before he’s crowded into her space, slow enough for her to feel like she’s being hunted and fast enough to stop her from thinking too much, and he’s sliding his mouth over hers like he’s been thinking about it for years.

He knows that perfect mix between strength and lightness, the way to nudge her mouth open like she’s made of china but press his lips down over hers like she’s begged him. He’s got his thumbs over her cheekbones, and it’s so electric that she swears she can feel ridges of his fingerprints on her skin. There’s a long, quiet moment where the world is just the slow and rhythmic press of his lips over hers, of his tongue sliding out along hers, of his palms cradling her cheek and jaw.

He kisses like a fantasy.

Donna gets her fingers to the knot on his tie, and pulls, pulling his frame against her, letting her knees fall apart so he can shunt a leg between hers and she’s not thinking at all, just needs him, just needs the firmness of his body against hers, needs the friction and the steady push of his thigh along her center, and she shifts to the edge of the desk and rocks her hips as he pushes in and cocks his leg up and  _ there _ , and her lungs jump as she strangles a deep breath against his mouth. 

God, she wants to fuck him.

His phone rings. 

Donna’s gone. She barely registers the chirp of the call behind her. She’s only aware of the buttons on his shirt she’s trying to get undone, of the smell of the cologne still lingering on his collar, the tautness in his neck punching his jugular out against his skin, the heat of his torso warming his shirt and kissing promise against her fingertips when she brushes along his front. 

There’s something in Harvey that’s less disappeared from the world, and the ringing of his phone knocks him back into reality enough to draw back from Donna, just a little, and she can see the effort it takes for him to focus, to pull himself back from the cliff edge. 

She could do it, if she just pulled him over with her in this moment. She could yank him back against her, she knew, and just one more kiss would do it, would steal the last shred of self control from him and throw them both over the edge. 

The phone rings again in the second before she can make the decision, and he blinks, and seems to suddenly realise where they are, and he looks both relieved that he hasn’t fallen over the cliff and also like he’s never wished more that he was anywhere but the office. 

He leans into her to grab the handset, and the ‘Harvey Specter’ he grits into the receiver when he picks up comes out bottomed and gravel against the back of his throat. Whoever is on the other is panicking at him. Donna can hear their voice, taut and rushed down the line, as she nudges her lips and tongue up along the side of Harvey’s neck until she can tug his earlobe lightly between her teeth. Harvey shuts his eyes and takes a steadying breath that’s so deep it makes her feel a smug satisfaction, and it ends in the slow press of his lips in the spot where her jaw and neck meet.

Harvey is talking his client down, calming them with logic and reason and telling them there’s no problem, and Donna’s chasing the way his voice catches subtly when she nudges his tie and collar aside and presses her tongue into the gap between his clavicles. She’s worked her way back up to his mouth, pressing loose, silent kisses against him. 

She swears she hears him whisper,  _ fucking hell _ , and then, pressing his palm over the handset to block the microphone, he murmurs, “I have to deal with this,” and she’s not sure if he’s swearing because he’s turned on or because he’d mad. Maybe both. Donna pulls back, and he’s serious, but he’s still leaning in, still has his mouth open against hers. She can see him warring with himself; this is insane, what they’re doing, his client is important, Scottie  _ just _ left, and it’s not so late that they aren’t risking being discovered by some first year pulling a late shift. She can see him swinging back and forth between throwing himself into her and pulling back into safety. She’s swinging too, but she’s also been pressing away jealousy for months and there’s something in her that wants to reclaim him as hers. 

Harvey lets the receiver drop away from his mouth just enough that whoever is on the line won’t hear him whisper into her ear, and his voice is slow and as dark as his eyes as he rasps  _ call me when you get home _ against her earlobe. 

Donna slips past him, the loss of the weight of him against her jarring, and she’s dazed enough that collecting her bag and getting down the hallway feels like it happens unconsciously. 

Her phone chirps in the elevator, and it’s a text from him. 

_ The second you get home.  _

She flags a cab, and it takes a moment to remember her address. She tries not to think about how tense she is and about the uncomfortable flush of damp against her underwear, and she calls when she’s still pushing her front door open. 

He answers, and he doesn’t even say hello or ask if she got to her apartment okay, just says, “take your dress off,” and it’s mostly breath when he speaks.

“God. Your voice. Where are you.” Her shoes are off in a moment, her dress following, and by the time she falls into her own bed she’s only in her underwear. 

“Ray’s driving me home. Ten minutes. Privacy screen is up.” 

“Are you touching yourself?”

“Trying not to. Jesus. Donna.”

Even though he’s not there, even though he’s miles away and it’s just his voice, she feels the same maddening draw towards him that’s led her to pull him into her apartment in the distant past and, in the not-so-distant, against her on his desk. 

There’s an unspoken understanding between them; he’s not on his way to her place. He can’t; they’re too far past every line they’ve ever drawn as it is. If he’d shown up at hers, fallen into her front door, there’d be no phone call to stop them, no intern to walk past the glass of his office and make them add a foot of safety between their bodies. If he’d shown up, there’d be nothing preventing them from indulging every fantasy and daydream they’d ever had about each other. And in the harsh light of day, when Donna is breathing in oxygen and not Harvey, she knows. He probably does as well. 

He isn’t ready for this.

The distance is still the last barrier they have and there’s an instinct they both have to protect it even as they collapse into the fantasy of each other. 

“I nearly couldn’t leave the office,” she says, and god, she’s basically purring into her phone, but she doesn’t have the presence of mind to feel embarrassed about it. 

“I nearly stopped you.” She hears him blow a breath out between his cheeks and he sounds like he’s trying to gather himself. “Talk to me.”

“I’m on my bed. Dress is in the hallway.” It’s far from the first time they’ve done this, but never when they’ve just spent a solid fifteen minutes dragging their mouths and bodies against each other, and it’s added a level of wantonness to her tone she’s sure he hasn’t missed. “Just in my underwear.”

“Wet?”

“Since you smiled at me. You know that. You know it’s always that.”

She hears him mutter  _ Jesus _ under his breath. “Bra,” he says. 

“Black. Lace. Panties too.”

“Off.” 

Donna sets her phone on speaker and drops it next to her to free her hands up. She slips out of the last of her clothing and hums, “done. You’re overdressed.”

He huffs, and she can’t tell if it’s laughter or tension. “I don’t think Ray would appreciate the surprise. And anyway I’ve thought about this.”

“You’ve thought about sitting in a car by yourself and telling me to take my clothes off? You have weird kinks,” she says, and tails off with a hitched breath as she passes her fingers down her skin and settles one over a breast, slipping the other between her legs. 

“Undressing you first,” he clarifies. 

Harvey’s not really someone who needs to take control, and Donna is definitely not submissive, but the image of Harvey, fully suited and settled over her naked body, his weight pressing her into the mattress, nudging his chin down her body to pull his tongue over her skin, is not unpleasant. And the image of him sliding down further, resting his head between her legs, slipping his mouth over her and his fingers inside her, kicks something low in her gut. 

“Tell me,” he says then, and she’s never regretted leaving the office more. 

She tells him as she trails her hands across her skin, tells him she’s imagining his fingers where hers are, that it’s him thrumming against her nipples until they peak and she’s so sensitive there that it sets her right on the edge, enough so that she has to take a moment to gather herself, and he hums appreciatively down the phone line at the sound of her steadying her own breathing around the sound of his name on her lips. 

He talks, low and longing, alternatively instructing and imagining, and he’s delicious, all sultry and combining something that sounds like love with an undercurrent of tight control and just enough  _ goddamns  _ to make him sound like he doesn’t know what he’s going to do with her. He knows her intimately, beyond anything either of them would admit to anyone else, and he knows exactly when to tell her to circle her fingertips over her clit, when to hitch her knee up for purchase like she imagines he would if he were there. 

He waits until her breath hitches in just the right way before he murmurs, inside, and she does, slipping one finger in, then another, curling and pressing inside until she finds just the right angle and pressure, and she sucks in a hard breath as she throws her other arm over her eyes to block out anything that isn’t the feel of his voice in her head and her hand over and inside her. 

They do this, slipping regularly enough that they can’t keep calling it a mistake, so they don’t call it anything - but it still surprises her every time how easily it seems to know exactly what to say, how to breathe, and she’s not sure how he manages to pull her right to orgasm in a few minutes with just the low pull of his voice against his throat. She’s somewhere between the nights she gets herself off with imagining him and with her hands or whatever novelty she’s trying out that night, whatever combination of fantasy and toy and touch takes her fancy, and the time he showed up at her door and fucked her half-senseless, covered in the sticky residue of the cream he’d trailed his tongue through. 

She’s taut, the low of her back arched up and her whole body is keening towards him, towards relief. She tells him she’s close. He says, “fucking hell Donna,” and it’s that low rumble that kicks the tight coil in her stomach over the edge, and she gasps her release and his name into the crook of her arm, her body pulling up against itself as it rolls through her muscles. 

“God. Donna,” he says, her name escaping across his voice like he’s trying to keep a secret, and he sounds so much like he’s trying to hold back his own release that it knocks into her spine and sets off a second orgasm, stretching and rolling out from the second, and she wonders distantly if she might pass out. 

She lets herself float for a moment as she comes back to earth, endorphins hazing the room around her, her body sitting light against her mattress and pillows, and she stretches out sex-lengthened muscles as a contented hum presses out of her lungs. 

“Good?” Harvey says, and he sounds like he’s trying to be amused but can’t quite keep the taut need for his own release out of his voice. She hears the door to his apartment slam shut and he breathes out heavily, equal parts tension and relief, and she stretches, slipping a hand behind her head, feeling pleasantly exhausted and limber, muscles wrung out and she’s probably going to feel the slow aftershocks rolling through her belly for a while longer.

“Mmm,” she says. “Home?”

“Home, thank god,” he mutters to himself, and she hears the phone and his keys clatter down. There’s no way he’s made it to his bedroom, and she imagines him leaning against his kitchen counter, one hand leaning on the counter for support and the other pushed over himself while he ducks his chin into his chest and tries to keep his balance. “I thought I was going to have to get Ray to pull over for a second there.” 

“Have you even taken your shoes off?” she asks, the edge of a laugh in her voice. 

“Who gives a shit.” She hears him sigh tightly and she can hear the shift in his lungs as he finally gets himself in hand. 

“Tell me,” she says. 

“I’ve got my pants open. One hand. I don’t think I’m going to last long. I’m remembering the dress you had on today. Fucking hell.”

“That old thing?” she asks lightly. She knows, though. The dresses that make her eyes look like an approaching storm are his favourite.

He just grunts. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what you do to me,” he says. “I’ve seen you acting like you don’t know exactly what you’re doing when you wear half the things you wear.”

“Oh, I know,” she says lightly. “Push your thumb over your head.”

“Should I be. Fuck. Mad that you dressed that way on purpose the day after Scottie left?”

“Should I be mad about how you just kissed me the day after Scottie left?”

“Good kiss though right.”

“Fucking hell Harvey. I nearly came.” 

He huffs smugly even as he has to bite back a moan, and she thinks,  _ bastard _ . 

“You told me you thought about me when you fucked Scottie the last time you were with her.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you think about me this time?”

“Donna.”

“Answer me.”

“Fuck. Yes.” She hears him shift, and his voice mutes out a little. She imagines him pushing his forehead into his bicep so he can gather himself enough to talk while he pumps his hand along his cock. “Were you jealous,” he says. “Of me and Scottie.”

“Yes. Were you jealous of Stephen.”

“Yes.” 

She’d thought the second orgasm she’d had had satiated her for the evening, but Harvey darkly admitting his jealousy at the same time he’s hitching his own breath through the phone is giving her second thoughts. “I would have rather fucked you,” she murmurs. 

“I know. God. I’m close. I nearly dragged you into the nearest bathroom when I found you two on that… date, or whatever it was.”

She catches her breath, because even in this moment, she can’t tell him she wanted the same, because that feels too close to inviting him to do it. So instead, she says, “shut up and concentrate. I want to hear you come.”

He stops talking, and she hears him break apart a moment later, gasping her name like he loves her, and she thinks that it’s too much and not enough all at once, and there’s only one conclusion she can draw from that. 

They’re both in a lot of trouble.

-

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a minute on this one! Thanks for your patience, dear readers, and as always reviews are deeply appreciated. Thanks to Aditi and Luisa in particular for the betaing, encouragement and commiseration.


	5. Season 4: Of Almosts

_ I’m a Donna fan.  _

Deep down, Harvey likes Shakespeare, she thinks. 

He wrinkles his nose at the language, at the costumes, at the things he interprets as pretence and pretension. But Shakespeare, even in the comedies, has a darkness to it that draws him, ruminations on power and consequence, and there’s something in the brutality that he appreciates. Maybe it reminds him of the way he shotguns his way through life, maybe it’s the bittersweet wish that he didn’t have to, maybe he feels an uncomfortable kinship with the way tragic heroes fly too close to the sun. She’s not sure. But she sees the way he watches like it’s speaking to him. 

And she sees the way he watches her, and that’s an entirely different look - unblinking, even, his mouth somewhere between hiding a smile and hiding a sigh, head cocked the way he does when he's figuring out how to get the better of someone. It’s unnerving, and it’s uncomfortable, and it also sparks off enough fantasies that she nearly forgets her lines just at the end of her third scene. 

He’s waiting at the stage door after the show, leant against the town car Ray’s parked up in like he owns the city, the slight of his 5 o’clock shadow making him look more unpredictable, and he’s loosened his tie off, which is either unconscious because it’s late or deliberate because maybe he knows she finds it just the right amount of shabby, she’s never sure. But he’s got his hands in his pockets and he’s daydreaming, his gaze down the street, and there’s a fantasy she has where he’s picking her up from the stage door because it’s her job and because they aren’t colleagues but lovers, and she indulges it for just a second in losing herself in his drifting smile and tucking her own shyly into her shoulder. 

He turns his head then, looks at her and into her, and he’s got that smile on, the one that creases his eyes like he knows something she doesn’t, but he’s genuine and warm and he almost looks proud of her. 

She thinks to say something sarcastic, or funny, or just  _ thank you for being here _ , but she catches his eye with hers just the right way, and then she doesn’t say anything, because there’s no need. He’s saying something they can’t say out loud, anyway, with the way he’s tightly controlling something behind the ease of his smile. It’s the smile she finds distracting, that he flashes sometimes in the office and ruins her for the next half hour, that she tucks away until she can get home and pull it into the sunlight of her imagination, run her hands over her body and think about his smile and the way he would lay heavy over her. 

It’s the smile that fuels so much of what she wants about him and now he’s showing it to her where there’s no office code of conduct and no lawyers or interns or Mike Ross to notice and comment. It’s his smile and her fantasies pressed outside of anywhere she can control them. It’s illicit and alluring and it’s dangerous, it’s very dangerous. 

And this time she kisses him. 

Much more happens than it feels like is possible with the way time is moving. Donna manages to have an entire conversation with him in the few steps it takes her to get to him, the smiles they flash at each other fading out behind a mutual and unblinking gaze that’s somewhere between soft and harsh, affection and lust all boiled together, traded sentences happening silently between them, of  _ you came _ and  _ you aren’t just who I see at work, are you _ and  _ you care far more than you admit and maybe you care too much. _ All of that is a lot anyway, but Donna is also still buzzing on adrenaline and the exhausted euphoria that comes with the end of a show night, and Harvey is looking at her like he’s just this side of tearing her clothes off, and she thinks she’s looking at him the same way, and it’s all a recipe for some badly-thought out decisions. 

What tips her over the edge is the way he’s leaning against the car in a way that negates the height difference he has over her, and so it’s the easiest thing in the world to walk up to him the way she has a thousand times, and then just take that extra step, the one she’s always too afraid to, the one that takes her right into his orbit, the one that brings her up against him. It’s the step that lengthens her body against his, that presses her leg in between his, that bumps hips and bellies together, mingles his scent with hers, and he smells like she remembers from every time she’s imagined doing this. 

They fit perfectly. Always have. If she didn’t know better she’d call it natural, maybe even destiny, except she doesn’t believe in destiny. So she settles for natural, and it also feels natural to bump her lips against his, to nudge his mouth open and close her lips over him, just possessive enough to scrape her teeth lightly against him and just loose enough to leave space for his tongue to slick against hers. 

If Harvey’s shocked he doesn’t show it. She’s got her hands full with her coat and the flowers he’d given her earlier, and so he brings his hand up to cup her cheek, to press his thumb along her bottom lip in the gap between kisses, and he huffs out a light breath against her mouth in a way that goes straight to her spine. 

When they pull back, a long moment later, Harvey’s hand on her jaw with his fingers tickling at the leftover curl in her hair, he looks at her like he wants to ask a question, but he also looks like he knows he can’t, because they don’t do that. They just let these moments hang, push in and dissolve, and the only difference is that it’s her slipping into one and pulling him in instead of the other way around, but the rules haven’t changed, she still works for him and a kiss doesn’t change that, just like it doesn’t change anything when he calls her late in the night to talk, or sit, or sleep, or fuck. 

The waters get a little muddier every time, with every text and call and with every time they slip into the shadows to play act their lust against car hoods and apartment doors, but it still just is what it is. 

So Harvey runs his thumb over the full of her lips, his eyes hidden and wistful, and she straightens the loose knot of his tie so that she has an excuse to look away from eyes that are too much, and he leans in again to kiss her, lingering and light, and then murmurs, “good night, Donna,” against her mouth, and she says, “good night, Harvey,” against his, and then he steps back to open the car door for her, and he doesn’t follow her in because they both know if he did they would end up falling into his apartment or into hers, so he closes the door behind her instead, his hand lingering, just maybe, against the glass, before he smiles and waves a cab down. 

Donna’s only home for a few moments when he calls, and she answers the phone with a low ‘hey’, because she knows what they usually do in the nights where they’ve slipped feelings and mouths against each other in the dark. It usually starts with Harvey, without preamble, asking what she’s wearing or what she’s doing, and it usually ends in him gritting her name down the phone. So she says ‘hey’ with the low expectation of hearing his drawn voice hitching over the image of her body in response. 

Instead, he says, “hey. Did you get home okay?”

“Just in,” she says. 

And, clumsily, like he’s never had to compliment anyone before, he says, “you were really good tonight.”

She feels her eyebrows quirk, questioning, but she says, “thank you, Harvey.”

“Tell me about Shakespeare.”

_ That _ was not what she was expecting. “Tell you about Shakespeare,” she repeats. 

“Yeah.” He sounds so embarrassed and unsure of himself that she can almost hear him shrugging down the phone. She hears the chiming of glass in the background, and he’s probably pouring himself a drink for a boost of courage. “Have you always… read his stuff?”

And it hits her. 

He’s trying. 

Harvey’s clear; he isn’t the relationship type. He’s not that guy. He says it all the time, that he isn’t that guy, he says it with a smile and a shrug. He says it when anyone too challenging shows interest in him. He says it when the parade of one-night stands phone back and when the women he’s several dates deep with stop returning his calls. He says it when he’s talking to Donna on the phone and things are getting too uncomfortable and too close to talking about his childhood or his mother. He says it when she nudges presents across his desk for whoever he’s dating, he says it when Mike asks for advice, and he says it, sometimes, like he’s trying to convince himself, when Donna calls to check up on him when Zoe or Scottie walk out. 

Harvey doesn’t try, because he isn’t that guy, and because, she suspects, he thinks that not trying is better than failing. 

But he’s trying.

She feels the pause as she takes a moment to think,  _ oh _ , and he probably feels the weight of every second of it. 

He clears his throat. 

“I had an English teacher in high school,” she says finally, slowly. “I’d never really thought much about Shakespeare before then. It just seemed like weird plays for old people. But Miss Irving…” she smiles unbidden at the memory. “She just taught differently. She was passionate about the language and the characters and how it all connected to everything going on while Shakespeare was alive. She showed me how revolutionary he was. And everything started to leap off the page.” 

“You never said,” Harvey says. He sounds almost surprised, like he’d forgotten there are parts of her that she keeps for herself, away from the office and away from him, that she has things that are just hers, things he doesn’t see. 

She tucks away a laugh. “You don’t seem like the kind of person who wants to spend half an hour discussing Hamlet and if he was really crazy or just pretending.” As she speaks, she hitches her phone against her shoulder and shuffles through the drawers in her bedroom, digging out shabby pyjama bottoms and a sweatshirt. 

“I’m not,” he says. “But… I liked it.”

And, haltingly, he finds his way through a discussion with her, on Shakespeare, and acting, and theatre, and she finds to her surprise, that he’s genuinely interested, and even more surprisingly, interesting. Harvey twists the law around his finger with an unconscious practised ease, and she sometimes forgets that underneath all that experience and studied indifference is a sharp, curious, inquisitive man. He asks questions that make her think, and observes things that catch her off guard with their depth. 

They talk, and laugh, for far longer than she thinks either of them expected, and when he finally says good night, after she’s made her way through three cups of tea and the clock has well pushed past midnight, she goes to bed, and lies for a long time with the uncomfortable feeling that the whole evening had felt far, far too much like how boyfriends and girlfriends talk.

Harvey was definitely trying, and she wonders if he’d meant to do that. 

-

She’s halfway through her second glass of wine, she’s thinking about suggesting a cup of tea as an alternative to a nightcap, and she’s finally talked Rachel down from shaking hysterical sobs to bitter recriminations about every sin she’s every committed, which she supposes is progress, when her phone vibrates quietly against the glass of her coffee table. It’s Harvey, texting through that Mike’s at his, and he’s checking if Rachel’s at hers. 

It’s just like Mike to show up at Harvey’s, just like it’s just like Rachel to show up on her doorstep. She quietly hopes Harvey doesn’t decide to solve Mike’s emotional turmoil by wedging him into a tuxedo and taking him out gambling. 

She calls him back when she’s in bed and Rachel is settled on the couch, quietly huffing her despair into her second box of tissues and probably reciting the lyrics to Rolling In The Deep to herself instead of sleeping.

“Hey,” she says when he picks up. Her voice is a low murmur, keeping her words hushed so they won’t disturb Rachel. 

“Hey,” he says back, and his voice is the same, and it sends a weird thrill up her spine, his low voice, always has, because she only hears it at night and never at the office, and when he uses it, it’s like he’s sharing a secret with her. “Is Rachel staying with you?”

“On the couch. You?”

“Mike’s on the sofa.” She hears him shift, and he lets a slow breath out of tired lungs. He’s in bed too, she guesses, probably with one arm propped up behind his head. She spends a lot of time imagining him when she’s on the phone, these days, and maybe it’s that a disembodied voice isn’t quite enough anymore. She wouldn’t admit to daydreaming of him, and she definitely wouldn’t admit to fantasising, but then, she isn’t sure what else to call it either. 

“Idiots,” Donna says of Mike and Rachel, and it’s all affection. 

“What happened, Donna?”

She hesitates, and she thinks he can probably hear her wince all the way across town. ‘Oh yeah, by the way, Rachel had an affair with your client’ is not a conversation she wants to have at any time, but especially not when Harvey has to see that client tomorrow, and when Rachel and Mike are within earshot of however that conversation would go. It’s not Donna’s story to tell, and Harvey… well, Harvey projects. He’d never admit it, and she’s given up trying to find subtle ways to point it out to him, but he knows he does it, deep down. Anger is an easy substitute for healing, and Harvey wears his anger like armour and calls it loyalty. Donna has known Harvey’s fury on occasion. She’s caught the brunt of it before; the frosty silence, or taut confrontation, or both, and Rachel is barely holding her bones together under her skin as it is. 

It’s not the time.

“They’ve got some things to work out,” Donna says, before her pause gets long enough for him to point it out. 

“I guess,” Harvey says, and she can hear the question and suspicion under his voice in the way he draws out the end of the word. He’s not stupid, and he knows when he’s being lied to, but he seems to consider it for a moment and then let it go. “Maybe he’ll be ready to talk tomorrow. To Rachel.”

“They’ll be okay. They’re just young and they both think the world is ending.”

Harvey laughs at that, a low huff into his phone that he slips under his vocal chords to keep his voice hushed. “You should have heard Mike, I thought he was going to throw himself into traffic.”

Donna laughs herself, stretches out, and her hand drops unconsciously to the other side of the bed, where Harvey would be, if he ever came or if he ever stayed. She’s almost surprised when her hand falls against the mattress instead of him. These conversations feel like the ones you have with your - well, your partner - worrying about friends and how they’re doing, plotting on their behalf and for their own good, and it’s strange that he’s blocks and a phone call away instead of lying on his back next to her in the dark with his fingers tangled in hers and a heavy calf knocked over her ankle. 

She pushes that thought away for later, and the pang that kicks her in the side along with it, and asks, “did you tie him to a chair?”

He snorts. “Got him drunk. Poor kid. He’s never met a glass of whisky he can handle. How’s Rachel?”

“She’ll be okay. Cried herself out eventually. She just wants everything to be okay. Conflict is hard for her if she’s invested.” She deliberately doesn’t think about the myriad of ways that last sentence could also apply to her. And to Harvey. And to her-and-Harvey. 

“And Mike’s itching for a fight,” Harvey says, with the vague disdain any boxer has for the ineffective flailings that mere mortals call fighting. “Got into it with Logan.”

“Who won?”

“Well, not Mike’s face.”

Donna laughs at that. Harvey probably grins down the phone when she does. He’s always loved making her laugh, she knows, and she loves the way he smiles when she does. It’s a vicious cycle, and it more than once leaves them in fits of giggles in his office while they take turns hissing at each other to pull it together, hoping Jessica won’t come down the corridor to catch them billing clients while they’re collapsed against his desk and sofa and wiping tears over something nobody else would find remotely amusing. 

Donna loves it when he’s gritting her name down the phone or kissing her in the shadows. But it’s when he’s laughing and not stopping, making her laugh, it’s in those moments that she thinks maybe it’s not so much that she loves it but that she loves him. 

It’s another thought to tuck away. “Poor kid,” she says.

“He really loves her,” he says, and his voice softens at that. Harvey would never admit it out loud, but he loves Mike, wants the best for him, and it’s obvious to anyone who knows what to read into the way Harvey calls him an idiot. “I think I set his head back on straight.”

Not for the first time that evening, Donna feels a pang of bittersweet kick her low in the stomach. “We make good parents,” she says.

He laughs low again. “We do.”

“Don’t kick Logan’s ass.”

“Don’t stay up all night hovering.”

“Good night Harvey.”

“Good night Donna.”

-

Louis finds out about Mike, and Donna panics. It’s usually Harvey panicking, and Donna calming him down, but this time it’s the other way around. He doesn’t see her panic often, and he definitely doesn’t see her cry, not like this, but if he’s surprised he doesn’t show it. He’s all strength and calm, all trust, he’s packed full of faith in her and somehow he’s all the right words and touch and looks. 

He sends her home, and tells her to rest, and that it’s okay, and she almost believes him. 

He calls in the evening when she’s wrapped in the comfort of old clothes and familiar movies and also the guilt of knowing he’s probably been at work wrestling the whole shit storm back under control without her. It’s not that she thinks he can’t handle it himself. It’s just that she doesn’t want him to have to. 

If he’s frustrated or disappointed in her, he doesn’t show it. “Hey,” he says, when she answers. “You okay?”

She thinks about a quip, or a joke, or a way to change the subject, or just to say  _ I’m fine _ , but instead she just says, “no.” It comes out tired, because she is, she’s so goddamn  _ tired _ , and it’s the first time she’s ever said that all by itself, just ‘no’, laid bare and raw, and she’s pretty sure she hears his breath pause for a moment because it means something that she said it.

“Mmm,” Harvey says in response, and she’s not sure if he’s inviting her to talk or if he doesn’t know what to say. 

So she says, “I lied to Louis,” and feels her breath hitch in her chest as she admits it out loud. Donna doesn’t lie. She especially doesn’t lie to her friends. And Louis had been furious, and despite all Harvey’s reassurance, despite the way he took her hands in hers and let the warmth of his palms steady the shaking in hers, despite the way he tilted his head at her like he trusted her, she had still lied. 

Louis had said to her, maybe she never had been his friend, not really, not since Mike took the elevator to Harvey’s office that first time, not since Harvey had said what Mike really was and she’d heard through the intercom. The look in his eyes said  _ liar _ , and it said  _ traitor _ , and it said all the things that add up to not being a friend. 

Harvey said Louis is wrong. But Harvey has a blind spot and they both know it. Harvey doesn’t think straight when it comes to Donna. Because he needs her - he needs her wit and brain and support. He needs her enough that he looks through her. He needs her more than he sees her, sometimes. 

All that added up makes her think that maybe Harvey is wrong and Louis is right. 

“He’s right,” she says, “and I lied.”

“We both did.” He’s trying to wrestle the blame from her, which is just like him, to try and shoulder things for both of them or just for her. He doesn’t know how to say what he feels, and he probably doesn’t know what it is he feels in the first place, but he knows how to build himself like a brick wall between the world and the people he’s let into his orbit. 

“But I’m the one who always acted like I wasn’t just tolerating him,” Donna says. “I’m the one he thought he could trust.” She thinks, Jesus, I’m an asshole, but she doesn’t say it. He’d just fight her on it and she’s not in the mood to feel better. 

He must pick up on the tension under her voice, because he doesn’t challenge her and she hears him sigh.

They’re silent for a couple of minutes. She wonders if he’s occupying himself with a glass of whisky or wandering around his apartment or if he’s just waiting for one of them to work up something to say that’s not complete bullshit.

And then he says, “I’m sorry.”

It’s not something he says often enough for it not to be a surprise. “What for?” Donna asks. 

“I did this. Me and Mike.” She can hear the edge of bitter running under the words. He loves playing in the grey but he rarely stops to think about how he casts everyone around him in shadow because of it. Every now and then, something happens that kicks the repercussions of his actions into the light and she knows he never really knows what to do with that. Harvey doesn’t do regrets, he doesn’t have the time for them or the space in his bones to fit them comfortably. 

But when it comes to her, it’s different somehow. He still sits her in the grey along with everyone else, but he seems aware and on edge about it. With Mike it’s ‘do your job’ and ‘get the fuck over it’ and ‘be a goddamn man’, and with Jessica it’s variations on ‘I will walk out of here right the fuck now’, but with Donna…

With Donna it’s sideways glances and the pad of his thumb on the back of her hand and the low ‘are you okay’, the sideways glances to make sure she’s not lying when she says yes and the texts at night to double check.

“I could have said something, and I didn’t,” she says, and even as the words come out they both know it’s not true. Harvey values loyalty, needs it, and Donna is steeped in it. It’s probably what drew him to her a million years ago - the thing in him that needs protecting latching on to the way she instinctively defends and insulates everyone in her circle. 

“Mmm,” he says again. Avoiding something, she knows, something he can’t or won’t say, and he’s been doing that a lot lately. Then, “are you watching Moulin Rouge?” he asks.

He’s been changing the subject a lot lately as well. 

“Ewan McGregor speaks for my wounded soul,” Donna says, following the redirect. Part of her is grateful. They both know she’d go down with him if it came to it. She’s said as much before. And right now they’re close to skirting the reasons why that is, and crashing into the brick wall of his ignorance and her rule, again. She’s right on the edge and the last thing she can handle this evening is another taut non-conversation loaded with subtext and dead ends. 

And then, of course, he surprises her all over again. 

“I could … come over? Bring popcorn. If you want company,” he says, and he somehow sounds both hopeful and deeply uncomfortable at the same time. 

It’s tempting. But it’s not smart, because she knows, deep down, why she’s tempted, and it’s not because she wants to watch a movie and eat popcorn with him. It’s because she’s fragile, and tired, and vulnerable, and she wants him to come over so she can make a huge mistake. She wants comfort, and to lose herself for the evening, and by herself that means movies and tea, but if he’s there it’ll mean a progression of sitting next to him on the couch and then letting her hand drop to his knee, through to pressing his back into the couch so she can settle herself over his and press out her grief in sighs and touch.

It wouldn’t be fair.

“No,” she says. “Thank you. I think I can survive without my boss hovering and worrying.”

“I didn’t mean as your boss,” Harvey blurts out, sounding somehow defensive, and she knows in her soul it was unintentional that he threw those words out into the open, and she freezes, and she thinks he does too because he goes silent except for his breathing. 

The air between them is very, very heavy.

“Are we…” She takes a deep breath and pushes out in a rush, before she can think too much about it, “Harvey, are we doing something here?”

The quiet that stretches out between them is probably no more than ten seconds but feels like days. Donna reminds herself not to hold her breath. 

Finally, Harvey sighs. “I don’t know,” he says. He says it like it’s the only honest thing he can think to say. 

It probably is. 

He doesn’t come over. They talk into the night, and when he eventually says good night, he pauses, like he doesn’t want to hang up, and if it isn’t something, she thinks, then she doesn’t know what the fuck else is going on. 

-

She doesn’t mean to mess up, but he’s being an idiot, and stubborn, and she steps into his space to make a point just after she’s dropped the freshly watered cactus on his kitchen bench. 

“I’m telling you, don’t make that mistake again,” she says, and as she says it she realises she’s just made a mistake herself, a big one, because she’s pressed in close enough to feel the tension sitting under his suit and the spark that fires up between them whenever they get too close, which is exactly why she’s been avoiding his orbit lately. There’s a moment, just a short one, where concern about Mike and clients mutes out into the background, and she’s just watching him, he’s just watching her, and she could swear the temperature in his apartment notches up suddenly. He’s tense, taut against his jacket and his eyes are sharp and frustrated, head cocked in the way he does when she’s right and he doesn’t want to admit it. He’s leaning his weight against the counter and she can see his fingers twitch against the marble, and he’s trying to figure out what to do with all the straining energy under his skin. 

She can see that he’s only a second away from reaching out to her. 

The problem is that they’re not in the office, and they’re not on the phone - there’s none of the barriers and safety nets they’ve constructed, no risk of interruption and no way for them to both tell themselves afterwards it’s just talking on the phone and so what, it’s not real anyway. There’s no out, no interrupting phone calls or interns, no doorway to push between them, no girlfriends or boyfriends to play at faithfulness towards, and he’s looking at her like he’s angry but also like he’s already undressed her in his mind and he’s just waiting for reality to catch up, and she belatedly realises that this, this moment right here, is exactly why they never go to each other’s places. 

That goddamn spark. It used to kick up every now and then, just rarely, and they’ve indulged it, and it’s grown more and more regular. It’s almost constant now, at least for Donna, a low stir in her gut that rolls perpetually through her whenever she’s in the same room as him. He looks at her with a steady, knowing look so often now, and he hasn’t said anything but she could swear he feels the same and the air has started to get thick whenever they’re in the same space. Even their joking and banter is cut through with a kind of competition, these days, and it’s not so much about either of them winning as much as they’re both pressing in to see who’ll crack first. 

Someday very soon, they’re going to need to do something about it, but alone in his apartment is decidedly not the right time or place. 

She summons every ounce of willpower she has and presses past him to leave. She pulls her shoulder back as she does to steer a clear berth away from him, because if she touches him, even an innocent brush of shoulder to shoulder, she can’t predict what that would set off between them. 

She’s nearly down the entrance when he says behind her, “Donna.”

His voice comes from behind her, and she already knows what the hitch in his voice means, she can hear it in his lungs, hear the confusion and frustration, and she thinks, how does he still think it’s just him this is impossible for. 

She ignores him, because she knows if she does anything else, if she hesitates for a moment, they’ll both more than likely end up pulling each other over the cliff edge. 

She has her fingers around the door handle, and she’s just starting to push it down when she hears, “Donna,” again, and as he says it he lands his own hand on top of hers, stilling her, and god, his chest is suddenly pressed up against her back. 

She doesn’t turn, because he’s so close and she knows instinctively if she turns her body into his, she’s done for. But that doesn’t help the way her skin flushes a shiver against his breath on the back of her neck, just where her shoulder curves in, and it doesn’t help the warmth of his torso against her, and it doesn’t help the unbidden flash of realisation of how easy it would be for him to hook the back of his fingers against her neck, to shift her hair out the way, to edge the zip on her dress down to her hips and follow the zipper with his tongue. Details jump out in the flash; the way his fingernails would scratch, just lightly, just enough for definition, down her spine, before he’d smooth his hands into the open dress, palms against her skin, pressing down against hips so he could hitch her body back against his and press his height along her back. The way his jacket and tie would tickle. The ghosted scrape of his teeth along her neck, ducking his head into her shoulder so she could get her hand up and push fingers through the hair at the back of his skull. 

She tries very hard to turn those thoughts away instead of murmuring to him to press her against the door and nudge her knees apart with his so he can shove his leg between hers to relieve some of the godawful and frustratingly delicious pressure building there.

“What, Harvey?” she says instead. Her hand is on the door. She’s said what she’s going to say.  _ Don’t stop me _ , she thinks desperately, because she’s hanging on to sanity and willpower with the crooked edge of a single finger. And anyway, unless they’re going to have a conversation he’s always shied away from, and she’s always imagined wasn’t necessary because of the fragile rule she’s tied together and dangled between them, there’s no reason for him to stop her from leaving. 

“You could have called. Why’d you come here?”

“I had to bring your cactus.” She holds her face still and tries not to cringe, at least outwardly. It sounds as trite as it is. 

“You got that on the way. That,” he gestures behind him, “is an excuse.” He steps in, closer, and as he does her body turns automatically towards him, and she sparks annoyance at the way she’s just betrayed herself, but only for a moment, because the hand that was stilling hers on the door handle slips up to press, flat-palmed, into the wall next to her, and now she’s boxed in, her fingers still around the handle behind her but it’s like he knows she’s not going anywhere.  _ Asshole _ , she thinks, but she doesn’t know if she’s thinking it at him for the arrogance of guessing at her lack of resolve, or at her for getting sucked into his orbit again, and she’s not sure if it’s insecurity or just a wave of pure need that tumbles through her frame. 

“Why did you come here,” he says again, and his voice has bottomed out against his throat, and he’s too goddamn close. 

The truth is, she doesn’t know. Because he’s right, and she could have called him. It’s a two minute conversation, and it would have been much easier to just call, and not to get in a cab and stop halfway to Harvey’s to pick up the cactus at a stall on the sidewalk. But there’s the pull, like a siren call, like oxygen above her if she could just break the surface, and she’s getting less and less able to ignore it - the need to just be in the room with him, like an addict, like he’s reality, like he’s existence. 

“I had to see you,” she hears herself saying. 

She’s out of breath, and he is too, and there’s no reason for it. The punch of his chest against his suit and tie tweaks something primal in her. He’s much, much closer than he needs to be, his mouth only a couple of inches from hers, height difference angling his head down and he feels like home and like a shipwreck all at once. He’s got his gaze on her, locked, and has he ever blinked before, because she can’t remember.

She thinks,  _ don’t stop me _ , again, but she’s so on the edge of control that she can’t prevent the words slipping out in a low murmur, and she sounds like she’s begging for escape and entrapment all at once.

“Don’t stop me.” 

“Why?” he asks, and he says it like he knows the answer.

She drops her hand from the door handle. 

“I -“

He swallows the rest of her sentence with his mouth on hers. 

She thinks  _ oh no  _ at the same time that she thinks  _ jesus finally  _ and she slicks her tongue against his, hooks her fingers into the first thing she gets purchase on, into the waistband of his pants, and yanks him against her, and then the world just … goes. It blinks out behind his heat and the way he tastes, he tastes like promise and sunlight and the memory of his weight in her bed. 

It’s overwhelming, and he kisses like the world’s ending, and she tips her head back so that he can press his lips down her neck, and that was meant to let her gather herself but it just sends a dark shiver along her spine and drags a low moan from her lips and this isn’t the office, it isn’t in public and it isn’t the phone and  _ holy fuck this is happening _ . 

His hands press down her sides, palming the hem of her dress up to free her legs, and then he slips his hands around to hook the back of her thighs, and he pulls, and she wraps her legs around him as he hitches her against him and presses forward, bumping the low of her back against the wall. Donna laces her fingers around the back of his neck and tips his head back to kiss him, and there’s a thrill in the artificial height advantage he’s given her that makes her scratch fingertips through his hair and push it messily back from his forehead. 

This man, is all she can think, and they very nearly fall, very nearly find themselves backing over the precipice, tangled together into oblivion. She wants to fall, wants to fall in love or in lust, wants to gently make love and wants to fuck, wants all of the extremes and all the space in between. Because, godammit, he tastes like oblivion. His mouth is promise and his skin is the limbo of the breath in between  _ what are we _ and  _ I love you _ and she traces over it with teeth and tongue. 

Of all people, it’s Harvey that catches on to the threads of sanity at the last moment. He’s punching throaty, deep moans along his jugular and Donna’s chasing them with the long press of her tongue, following the groan with loose open-mouthed kisses, when he gasps, “Donna,” and it’s not the way he normally moans her name. It’s a plea, and the word is so strained it sounds like it weighs more than he’s capable of lifting. 

Donna pulls back from him, a mix of concern and confusion, and she hums a question, because her throat is dry and her body doesn’t have the spare oxygen or concentration for words. His eyes are glassy, shot through with black, and she can feel his body humming under his clothes, his erection pushing against almost the right spot between her legs. 

“I think we should talk,” he says, but he can’t quite stop himself from leaning in to suck her bottom lip in between his, and his words come through muffled against her mouth. “About us.”

It’s the most unexpected thing she thinks he could have said, and he’s definitely said it with the worst timing, but then that’s about right for Harvey. It's so like him, finding the worst way and the dumbest moments to do the things he should have done days or months ago, his goodness wrapped up in stupidity and belatedness that he doesn’t realise follows him everywhere because he’s always so busy playing people that he forgets to hide his own tells. 

He's an idiot. And yet, he’s saying the thing, out loud, they’ve avoided saying, almost since they met, and of the two of them she never guessed it would be him that said it, and she can’t help but feel a flash of admiration even as her body and mind rebel against the concept of sanity and communication. 

“You think we should talk about us,” she repeats, and she has to take a breath every other word or so, because he’s mussed and shabby and his suit’s all messed up and he’s kissed all the air out of her lungs. She finds it hopelessly attractive. 

“I know you have your rule, but this… isn’t that. It hasn’t been for a long time. Has it?”

Fuck, he’s actually trying to have a serious emotional conversation with her at the same time that she has her legs cinched around his waist and her hands in his hair, and he’s still letting his palms roam freely over her ass. It would be hilarious if she wasn’t already caught firmly between the warring emotions of lust and an insane hope that this might actually be … something. “..no, Harvey. It hasn’t.” 

“I - I can’t keep going like this. This something-but-not. I can’t get you out of my head. I need -” 

_ More? You? For us to never touch each other again? _ Donna isn’t sure how that sentence ends. Maybe he doesn’t either. She tries to answer but he’s leant his head into the crook of her neck and he’s sucking lightly at the curve between her neck and jawline and that’s somehow yanked all the air out of the room. Her hands are pushing into the collar of his shirt, needing the feel of bare skin against his. “I need us to talk,” he says, and at the same time he’s steadily losing any sense of self control, and she sucks in a breath with her throat against his mouth when he gets the balance just right and frees a hand to palm over her breast. 

She’s sensitive there, always has been, and it sparks a thrum through her that’s so primal she almost loses the last threads of her sanity and she unconsciously pushes her hips against his. His knees nearly buckle and he huffs a breath that could have been her name against her skin. He presses his thumb down over her dress, finding her nipple, friction hardening it, and she definitely gutters his name into the ceiling. 

She very nearly, in that moment, gives in completely to the desire to tear his clothes off and push him to the ground so she can sink on top of him and pull into reality what they’ve been flirting with in dreams and on the phone. 

But he’s done something far riskier, and braver, even as he’s collapsing into her, and she thinks if he can find the courage to voice it, she can find the resolve to finally let it unfold.

She slips a hand under his chin, tips his head back to catch his gaze with hers, stilling his fingers by pressing her palm over the back of his hand, says, “hey. Hold on.” She’s breathing hard, and he is too, and goddamn, stopping him is just about the hardest thing she’s ever done. “Not here.”

“Donna -”

“Not here,” she says again, pushing a firmness into her voice she doesn’t feel. She nudges him to let her down, silently relieved her legs can handle the weight of her body when he does. “I can’t… trust myself right now.”

He smiles a little at that, half smug and half because he knows she’s right. His chest is still punching air in and out, and his hair is everywhere, and somehow the top couple of buttons of his shift have worked loose under his tie, and he’s not intimidated by her, by the thing they’re finally speaking into existence, and in the smile that cinches his eyes she could swear she sees love buried under all the desire. 

He’s devastating. 

“Tonight?” he asks.

“Tomorrow. After work.”

He takes a moment, nods. “Tomorrow.”

They linger. Agreeing to talk doesn’t dissipate anything, and her fingers twitch towards him, but she knows they don’t have the resolve to stop again, and holy shit this might actually be something.

It might be everything. 

“I should go,” she says, smoothing her dress and hair. She probably looks like exactly what she’s been doing, but she can’t quite work up any real embarrassment. Harvey nods, smiling like he knows something the rest of the world isn’t in on yet, reaches behind her to open the door. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

She smiles. “Tomorrow,” she says, and she’s still smiling when she flags a cab outside his door, because she can’t quite believe it, and she thinks, lets herself think for the first time since he left the DA’s office and pulled her into his future, something she has resigned herself to never thinking. 

As she leaves, she thinks, maybe he’s finally where he needs to be.

He doesn’t call that night, after she’s talked her way into Liberty Rail and into a solution for Mike and the firm, but he texts  _ Nougatine? I’m booking _ , and it’s just the mix of thoughtful and practical that she’s glimpsed in him from time to time, and maybe that’s what relationship-Harvey is like, and maybe he’s showing her.

She thinks she’s probably right when she confirms  _ Perfect. 8?  _ and he responds  _ Done x  _ and the ‘x’ is new and makes her smile so wide she thinks she might dislocate her jaw. 

It’s been a good day.

For a couple of years after, Donna won’t be able to go more than a week without thinking about the dark irony of the way that everything goes to shit the moment she finally lets herself consciously think that he could have been ready. 

-

She doesn’t notice that he’s vibrating with rage at first, when she finds him waiting for her at her front entrance the next night. She’s heading home to change for their reservation, and she guesses he’s there to pick her up, and she thinks  _ there’s a real romantic buried in there somewhere _ as she ducks a smile into the pavement and tries not to look flattered and like she’s nursing what she can only call a crush. She hides the schoolgirl flutter in her chest behind a joke about him showing up at her place, and she’s about to turn it into a vaguely suggestive comment about what might happen if their dinner and talk goes well. 

But then he corners her, interrupting, and she realises he knows exactly what she’s thinking, that she’s thinking about last night, and all the other times before that they’d gotten close to clawing their ‘them’ into the sunlight, and when he snaps “this isn’t that,” it’s not so much as him putting a hold on them figuring it out as much as it is him throwing it away all together.

He’s furious, like he was yesterday, but this time at her and not at Mike, and she’s forgotten how terrifying he can be when he turns on the full force of his sense of betrayal and hurt into sharp focus on her. He’s been slowly slipping into a gentleness towards her lately, and this is a left turn so unexpected that it shocks her into an instinctual defensiveness that she hasn’t had to throw between them since the last time he was this angry at her.

The last time he was this angry at her, she got fired.

She panics, because she’s aware not for the first time that she might be intelligent and empathetic and know people better than they know themselves, but Harvey knows the law, and under the fury he’s terrified for her. And if Harvey is terrified, then somehow, something has gone very wrong. 

In her stammered excuses, he latches onto Mike, and she can almost see physically him shift his anger away from her and towards him, which is just like him, finding ways to absolve her of fault and guilt. 

But even as he does so, he snaps himself away from her in a way that is both subtle and brutal.

There are moments where he looks at her and she feels like she can see his soul leave his eyes, like he’s protecting himself from something. She thinks she sees him do it when he confronts her outside her apartment, just before he pushes back into the car to find and confront Mike. She first knows for sure he does it when they had thought they’d gotten off the hook, and Donna had walked into his office to thank him, and they’d had a moment when she’d thanked him, and he’d looked up at her from his desk, and it was just a fraction of time but it felt like everything stood still so he could look right into her and her back at him, and she thinks maybe he’ll say something, maybe skirting around prison by the skin of her teeth has built some courage in him. And then Terrance had walked in and handed him a slip of paper, and Harvey looked down at it, and when he’d looked up again his eyes were cold, and he was gone from them. 

He snaps away. 

He snaps away when Louis tries to take over her case, stepping in and speaking for her, deciding for her, and he’s never done that before. He snaps away when she says  _ not guilty  _ in a courtroom and he browbeats the opposing council until she thinks they might ask for the death penalty. He snaps away when she tries to caution him, to revisit Louis’ offer of help, and then he takes it further, takes it too far, rounding on her at exactly the wrong moment, writing his frustration in furious outbursts and slammed folders and how can he be so  _ goddamn _ oblivious, she thinks. 

Donna knows about how he can flick a switch and turn off his humanity. She's seen it hundreds of times over the years. But when it’s her, it feels a lot less like what good lawyers do and much more like cruelty. 

She'd always thought him turning away from his own heart, from his secret warmth and from the way his eyes crinkle when she makes him laugh would make him feel more like a giant, more superhuman, more like blind faith and trust. But it doesn't, it hurts, and it hollows her, and she thinks, maybe the way she leans her belief in him like he's made of rock has been a mistake.

She tries to push back and find him, find the Harvey she needs, who texts to make sure she gets home okay and calls at 9pm to talk about the Yankees or his dad. But he’s gone. She texts him and he doesn’t text back. He doesn’t answer calls. 

Finally, as she stands in his office, tells him she’s terrified, that she needs him, needs the him who calls and cares and tries, she finally, finally, stands in front of him without the protection of phone lines and distance and tells him she  _ needs _ him, needs his eyes back and his soul and all his humanity and kindness, needs his help, needs him, the full of him, messy and warm and all of it, and he … doesn’t.

She wonders if he’s just the same as he’s ever been. 

-

He tells her he loves her, and he leaves.

She hadn’t seen either of those things coming. She’d invited him over, for dinner, as a thank you, and she hadn’t said out loud that maybe now this whole shitshow was behind them they could get back to  _ I think we should talk about us _ and whatever it was that comes after that. It had felt too much, too big to say out loud, after everything, after the way she’d seen his shoulders set and his eyes go rigid and cold. She wasn’t sure if that was Harvey being a lawyer or Harvey deciding they - them, together, whatever - are a mistake. So she’d asked him for dinner, like they’ve done a hundred times before, but this time at her house, and that was different, and she hoped that spoke into the silence that had stretched between them over the last couple of weeks. 

He’d come over, and helped cook, and drunk wine, and they’d laughed and joked easily, like it had been forever, and he was back in his own eyes, and she felt a mix of relief and  _ maybe _ that spent the evening tweaking low in her gut. And then they’d sat and talked, quietly and open, and not letting alcohol and snatched kisses masquerade in place of being vulnerable, and he’d looked at her, long and silent, and he looked like his whole future was in front of him and he knew it. 

She’d thought  _ this is it _ . He’d said things were different, she was different, and he’d looked at her the way he had in the past, like he was carrying a secret he couldn’t anymore, like he needed to drop it, like he needed her. He’d looked at her like she’d only ever imagined he’d look at her, one day, in the open, and not in secret on street corners or doorways.

He’d looked at her in a way that made her lungs stop and time along with it. His leg was pushed against hers on the sofa, sparking that fucking spark between them, and all he’d needed to do was lean in, lean in for real, lean in without barriers and walls and second thoughts, because something was happening, something between them was threatening at the surface and all he had to do was lean in and say  _ it’s you it’s always been you _ and the last years of texts and calls would stop just being mess and start being the beginning of them. 

And instead, he’d run. He said he loved her, looked at her like it wasn’t a lie, and he’d left without another word or an explanation or apology. He’s edged her to the cliff face with him, and as she jumped he pulled back. Harvey is an infuriating, complicated man, but Donna thought she was different. He’d said. He’d  _ said _ she was different. And yet, she suspects, she is far from the first woman he’s left speechless and caved in from the weight of his dropped expectations, his unsaid goodbyes, his fearful turning away. 

She’d always ignored the nagging thought that maybe he’s a coward, and yet here she was. 

And it hits her all at once just how tangled and unhealthy whatever they’re doing is. She should have known, because it’s always in the dark, always where things are easily blurred, hidden, easily ignored, in the dark corners of nighttime phone calls and texts, in the evening where stolen kisses and touches feel like magic and not like dysfunction, not like they’re both taking advantage, not like addiction, not like they’re grabbing for something that could be real and authentic and both twisting it for momentary satiety and pleasure. 

He’s not lying that he loves her. He said it, and he means it. But she can see it, only just now, how easily he switches something off in his brain in the moments between the Donna he works with and goes to dinner with and drinks with, and asks for advice, between that Donna - the one he loves, and the Donna he gutterally rasps down the phone line to, the one he releases himself over and lust-whispers that he wants to fuck. 

He’s edged the Donna he loves and the Donna he lusts over together, nearly touching them, all promise, mixing eyes that love her with hands that need her, and they were so, so close to pulling all the threads together finally. And she doesn’t know if it’s Liberty Rail or something she’d said or if it’s just cowardice or all three, but he’s squeezed his way out from between them, and he’s running. 

She picks up her phone like she’s addicted, checking for a text or a call, typing in texts of her own that she deletes because they’re too raw and too confused and too much of slowly growing anger. She hovers her finger over his name in the phone book and thinks better of calling. 

Donna’s watched her sister, watched her manipulate her way through relationship after relationship, and she knows dysfunctional when she sees it, and she knows how easily the codependency can turn into abuse, she’s watched it happen, watched it take years, or months, or just weeks, but she knows the pattern, and she and Harvey aren’t there, but there are red flags waving, and she’s told herself a thousand times she won’t be that person. Because it’s not just him, it’s her as well - she’s told him she can’t, that she has boundaries, and rules, and still so often Donna goes home, and calls him, and it’s only a few minutes before he’s telling her all the shadows of his fantasies and she slicks her fingers inside herself to play them out and use her body to make them both come. It’s her as much as it is him. But she can’t, anymore. 

She can’t do it. Not even for him. 

Tomorrow, she thinks. She’ll give him until tomorrow. 

-

Tomorrow is worse, because he’s suddenly where he was years ago, built out of excuses and shadow, hiding himself away, twisting words he said with conviction and terrified honesty into platitudes of friendship and pity, and for the first time she thinks almost sincerely, fuck him. Not because she doesn’t love him, but because she does, and how could he misread her so thoroughly, or maybe it’s the opposite, maybe he knows exactly what’s happening between them and can’t find a way to stop his heart hammering into his chest when he thinks too hard about it. He doesn’t mean to, she thinks, but he’ll break her heart to protect his. 

“I’m leaving you, Harvey,” is the hardest thing she thinks she’s ever said, and she’s faint with the effort of looking like she’s in control when she does. 

He’d shut down against her, and now she does the same, because what else can she do - the shock and disbelief is written so clearly on his face that if she lets herself really see it how she normally sees him, if she sees him with her heart and soul alongside her eyes, she’ll cave, she’ll get halfway down the office corridor before she turns back to him, because she loves him. 

She loves him, but she can’t do it anymore. If she doesn’t finally choose herself, right now, right in this moment, she’ll never find a way out from under him. Whatever it is they have, whatever it is they are, it’s not healthy, and if she doesn’t amputate, if she doesn’t cut him out of her, then she knows right in her core that they’ll kill each other, eventually. 

She leaves him, and walks away without looking back, straight home, and for the first time with Harvey, the first time, she lets herself cry over him. 

-

It’s the first thanksgiving for as long as she can remember that she doesn’t talk to him, and it’s not because he doesn’t call. 

She sits, legs up to her chin, her father’s sweatshirt on and, in the flickering solitude of the evening firelight, she lets her phone vibrate on the coffee table, and sees his name hovering, and doesn’t answer. 

Because, she thinks, they're done. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for continuing on the journey of this ridiculously out of hand story. Special thanks to Aditi and Luisa who keep me sane and point out when my ideas are stupid. 
> 
> If you enjoyed, or if you didn't, please feel encouraged to leave a comment. And as always thanks to the Suits fandom for being the most talented and generous bunch to hang out with.


	6. Season 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of door knobs and dictaphones.

He comes to her door, and tells her he’s been paying her salary, and it’s awful. 

Harvey’s a complex and complicated man, and he’s been at the mercy of the emotions he ignores for as long as she’s known him. He’s taut, eternally braced against the blindside of anger and frustration, of romance, of compassion. Harvey plays emotions like poker chips and forgets that it’s not that simple. He’s wrapped up and buried himself, but he’s still there, thrumming under the surface, despite his best efforts since Liberty Rail scared him into retreat. Donna can see. She can see the sparks of everything he’s kidnapped away from himself. They flash out, in kickbacks of anger and jealousy. 

It was jealousy written all over him, when he’d shown up. Jealousy threw him to her door and her salary in her face, and she can’t quite reconcile the Harvey she knew, just a few weeks ago, all secret smiles and gentle kisses and _I think we should talk_ , with the Harvey in front of her, ugly and envious and using hidden generosity as a battering ram and a bargaining chip. 

He’d known it wasn’t the right thing to do or say. He’d kept his actions from her for twelve years, hiding away from her the money he’d used to match her worth with her wallet. And he’d never said anything, not ever before, and that’s just like him, unconscious of his own caring because caring makes you weak, he thinks. Instead, he calls it strategy or pragmatism and forgets to mention it. He’d never said anything, and that probably made it beautiful, in its own clumsy way. 

But out in the light, out where he’s twisted it into a weapon and into points on a scoreboard, into some paranoid competition that only exists in his anxious imaginings, it feels too much like him saying _you owe me_ or _I own you_. He’s looking at her like he has some claim to her, some right over her that Louis doesn’t. 

It’s far, far beyond any realm of acceptable. She’s put up with his mood swings and intricacies, with his manifested issues and his arrogance and infuriating self doubt, his obliviousness and his clumsiness and all of his mess, and all of that had been okay, really. At the end of the day it all built up to him, all those scattered fragments gathered, and all the pixels of him had made sense. He’d made beauty out of the mess, somehow. 

But now he’s looking at her like he never has before, like he owns her, like he’s covered the expense of her and now he’s owed interest and return, like she’s a disappointing business investment. 

He’s looking at her like he thinks he bought her. And he’s struggling, she can see it, but… Goddamn. What a fucking _asshole_. 

She says, “maybe you are jealous,” and she slams the door in his face. 

Adrenaline cracks through her spine at the same time the door punches closed, and she instantly finds herself trying to stay upright on shaking legs, fury and energy making her heart clap erratically against her chest. 

Goddamn him. 

She stands, unsteady, in the doorway, adrenaline and hurt mixing with the fury in her soul, making her hands shake. _Goddamn_ him. Goddamn Harvey. Harvey, who will hurl unchecked generosity into the secret and the silence, but who will burn every bridge in sight when he’s in pain because he doesn’t know anything else. Goddamn him.

She stands for several long minutes in her entranceway, shivering against the warring desires to either text Louis and resign so that she never has to see Harvey again, or to throw the door open and chase him down the hallway to have it out with him. 

And then she hears him. 

He’s still there. Breathing like he’s run a marathon, like he doesn’t know if he should leave or kick the door in, like he’s lost, like he’s so far underwater that he doesn’t even know which way the surface is anymore. She can hear the catch in his lungs, the uncertainty in the way his breath rattles on the way out, the edging shake in the inhale. 

The problem is, she misses him. It’s only been days, and she’s trying not to, trying not to need him, to think about him every second, to worry over him and about him and lie awake at night turning his heart over in her own chest. 

As she’s found, saying _I’m leaving you Harvey_ might help with the pain of sitting outside his office every day and feeling the weight of his smile and his longing and sideways glances, but it doesn’t help with the way he’s burrowed down inside her and found a place to leave a part of himself. Whatever it is that he’s left is sharp and heavy enough to press in on her lungs when she tries to sleep. 

And he’s still there. She can feel him like she can feel the sunlight past the window in the morning, not because she can see him but because her whole being bends towards him. 

She says, sharply, “Harvey.”

The silence stretches out between them for a long, tense moment. Even through the door, there’s that familiar spark, and it’s shot through with bitterness now, but it’s still there. He doesn’t speak into it, though. Maybe he’s hoping that she’s just guessing at him being there and that if he’s quiet she’ll think she’s mistaken. Maybe he’s struggling for something to say. Maybe, like her, he’s just done - worn out from missing her, missing them, tired and threadbare and past finding words. 

And then, slowly, unbidden in front of her, the quiet turns into solace. There’s something between them that’s built over 12 years and it hasn’t gone away from just a few days. It’s a bubble, a peace, a ...something. She's missed it, that feeling, and she wishes for it, she fucking misses him. She leans her palms against the door, and then her forehead, because it’s closer to him. “Harvey,” she says again, and this time it’s a low murmur. 

“Donna,” he says, just over a whisper, and she knows he’s the same as her on the other side, forehead and fingers laid against the woodgrain, pressing his weariness into the door. She can feel him, through the timber, and she feels the fight go out of him. She should be mad, not leaning against the door like she’s leaning against him, not trading anger for silence and comfort. And she _is_ mad. She’s livid. Throwing her salary in her face is low, even for him, even though he’s struggling and trying to find air. She’s still trembling against the door, the last vestiges of furious adrenaline shaking through her fingers. 

But she misses her friend, the one who she talks to at night, the one who knows her and who she knows back, low and honest, because they’re always honest at night. The shadows help, she thinks. They’ve always hidden their honesty inside the dark. 

So she says, quiet and gentle and kinder than she intended, “I know this is hard on you. And I know you think this probably isn’t hard on me.” She takes a moment, because she can feel a waver in her throat brewing and she doesn’t want him to hear it, and she swallows around it. It comes out anyway, but she doesn't care that he hears it, because she misses him. “But you’re wrong. It’s not that I don’t want you to come over. It’s just... This is killing me, Harvey. I don’t even know how to begin to say it. You have no idea.” 

She shakes her head, pressing her forehead in and her eyes closed, and asks herself, when did this get so damn hard. “But you can’t do this. You can’t show up, and throw my salary in my face, and treat me like I’m on the other side of the courtroom. You can’t. You owe me that much.”

There’s a moment, and she hears him sigh. “I know,” he says. There’s an apology in there, she thinks, as much as he’s ever able to apologise. But his voice cracks over his breathing, and he says, all in a rush, “Everything’s falling apart, Donna. I need you. I need … I need help.”

“Don’t.” She doesn’t mean it to come out as harsh as it does, but he knows. He knows exactly how difficult it is for her to say no. Saying no to Harvey is like saying no to oxygen. It suffocates her, it’s panic-inducing, and it shakes her awake in the night with the spike of sweat down her spine. Finding him in his need and pulling him out of whatever pit he’s dug himself into isn’t just what she does, it’s who she is, has been for a long time, and her instinct screams at her to help him.

“I can’t,” she says.

“Please.”

“No.” 

It’s the single hardest thing she’s ever had to say. 

She remembers, then, remembers a few weeks ago when being this close didn’t mean killing herself to refuse him through her apartment door. It meant glances and smiles, meant light brushes of skin on skin and bolder, experimental kisses, meant the taste of his skin on her tongue and the weight of his body against hers, meant the particular pinch in her neck his height pressed into her muscles when he caught her by surprise in doorways and in his apartment, and she thinks, how quickly things dissolve. But even as she thinks that, she feels the kick and the spark and all she wants is for him to push the door open and pull her into his orbit, press his palms around her back and tell her everything is going to work out, the way he has a hundred times before with steady, resolute touch. 

“No.” She says it again, mostly to herself, and it sounds hollow. 

There’s a moment, of quiet, of them breathing, of her waiting - for him to leave, or find words, she isn’t sure which.

“I’m sorry. About the money,” he says eventually. His voice is lower than it was, slipped somewhere near the floor, and she realises, he’s sitting. There’s a slight knock; she imagines him leaning his head against the door, legs kicked out in front of him and elbows resting on his knees. “It was a shitty thing to do.”

She doesn’t know how to say ‘that doesn’t make it better’, so she doesn’t say anything. Because she doesn’t know if he’d apologise if she hadn’t confronted him. Probably not. 

Mainly, all she can think is that she’s tired. Of the day, of the situation, of Louis, of him, the whole damn mess, she’s exhausted of it all. So she sits, the way she guesses he has, her spine curled against the door and her elbows pushed against bent knees, letting one hand push through her hair so she can lean the weight of her head against her palm. 

She’s been silent long enough that Harvey nervously tries to fill in the silence, and says, “I’ll talk to Louis. I’ll keep paying, I don’t care about -”

He’s clueless, and she knocks her head against the door, frustration pushing strength against her vocal chords as she interrupts. 

“God Harvey. Shut up. I don’t care about the money and you should goddamn know that.”

He mutters, “fucking hell,” under his breath. He knows, she suspects, that he’s in the weeds and that he can’t seem to find his way back. 

“Jesus. How did we get here, Donna?” he says, and he sounds as broken as she’s ever heard him. 

There’s nothing she can say that isn’t painful or a lie or both. So she doesn’t say anything. She sits in the silence with him, and lets the quiet slacken the anger. 

It’s Harvey that breaks it. 

“I keep … not seeing you at work,” he says. “And I forget why, and then I go to call you in the evening to tell you about my day, and ... “ He laughs, but it’s all pain and no humour. “I have so many messages I haven’t sent you.”

And then, he takes a breath, and he says, “I miss you.” His voice is turned towards the door, and he sounds nervous, like he doesn’t know if he’s allowed to say it out loud, like admitting it is weakness, or breaking whatever new lines she’s tiredly drawn, belated and shaking, between them. 

And she thinks, _oh, Harvey_ , and she swears to god her heart cracks in half for him, and for her, and she thinks, why couldn’t he, why couldn’t she, why couldn’t everything just be _different_ than it is. 

But she doesn’t say she misses him, even though she does. She misses him with a low constant ache and with a sharp suddenness. She misses the whole of him and all the parts, his frame and his hands and his smile, his hooded eyes, the way he pouts if she takes the bigger whisky, she misses him in person and his name in her phone, she misses him in the atmosphere. She hadn’t realised how much he was built into every part of her until he wasn’t anymore and she has to keep reminding herself that if she hadn’t amputated, then there would be no way. 

She wished she missed him more than she knew that he’d kill her if she didn’t cut him out. He’s champagne laced with chloroform - delicious and dulling and lethal if she doesn’t get the dose just right. 

She thinks, _I miss you_ , anyway, but she doesn’t say it, because if she does, she’ll unlock the door and pull him in, pull him inside her apartment and inside her body, and he’s still not out of her heart. He’ll cement himself even further. 

“I know,” she says instead. “But you still can’t do this.”

“Do what?”

“Come over. You can’t anymore.”

“Donna -”

“You can’t.” Her voice cracks the same way his does, but neither of them say anything. There’s another long moment, and she presses her fingers together and tries not to let boiling anger and loss turn so much into grief that she breaks. 

“Okay,” he says, finally. “I’m going to try not to be jealous.” 

“I’ll try,” Donna says, “not to …” she casts for the words. 

“... love me?” Harvey says, and he sounds as worn out as it’s humanly possible to be. He sounds like patchwork. 

She thinks, _of course you would realise this at the exact wrong moment_.

Her fingers twitch towards the door handle. 

But she can’t. 

She doesn’t answer, and he leaves. 

  
  


-

  
  


He thanks her for twelve years, and something shifts. 

They’re fragile, close to broken glass, and the thank you, the way he said it without seeking anything back, the way he walked away from her down the hall and tweaked his head back towards her a little, isn’t quite enough heat to bring the edges back together. But it’s a start. She’s just not sure what to do with it. 

They don’t run into each other at work any more. She’s stopped using the executive kitchen, initially because she couldn’t quite handle running into him, and then because it felt like she couldn’t skirt that ‘no secretaries’ rule with a smile and wink anymore. She never has cause to be down the hall, down near her old desk, except to challenge him or to defend Louis, and that’s still horrible when she has to do that. 

They don’t meet at the elevators to walk the hallways together anymore, they don’t sit in his office for drinks, they don’t idle in the lobby, talking about work which is really just finding excuses not to leave straight away. 

He can’t come over, because she knows it’s a bad idea and because she stood on the other side of a locked door and told him not to. She can’t call, because it’s the same as asking him to come over - maybe not physically, but that doesn’t make any difference. 

She’s in a taxi, heading home, and she’s a little too exhausted from the emotional effort of working for Louis (she hadn’t quite realised how much effort Norma must have put in during her every waking minute to stop him from derailing both his own career and the whole firm every day) and turning over the ‘what now’ of Harvey all afternoon.

He’s hovering, in her brain and in her spine, and almost without thinking she has her phone in her hand and has pressed send on a text. 

****

It’s a moment, and she feels like she can feel him worrying his phone in his palm, staring at the screen and trying to decide how to respond or if it’s okay to respond at all. 

Then, three dots. 

****

****

****

****

  
  


****

She slips her phone back in her pocket. 

It’s not much. But it’s something. 

  
  


-

  
  


They go to Del Posto, and she spends the whole night thinking that if she wasn’t with Mitchell, and he wasn’t … whatever it was he was doing with Esther, then there’d be no way they wouldn’t have gotten drunk and fucked in the bathroom, amputation be damned. He’d said ‘friends’ in the file room a couple of days ago, and she’d agreed, friends would be nice, but he spends the evening shyly teasing the rim of his wine glass with his finger, and she’s not sure if he’s meaning to do it but all she can picture is him pushing her roughly into a bathroom wall and slipping inside her up to his knuckles. 

He does all the small things, every damn thing he does that settles a low hum of need for him in her stomach. The way he leans back sideways in his chair when he laughs, the tilt of his head when he’s telling her a story he’s shy about so recites to his main course instead, the quirk of his eyebrow when she has some insight he wasn’t expecting, the wide, easy smile he has, how he buries his laughter in his wine glass because he’s a giggler and hotshot lawyers don’t giggle in public. He does them all at once, and at some point she becomes aware that she’s not even engaging in the conversation with him anymore, he’s just talking and she’s just staring, and she knows she’s blatant but she can’t help it - it’s all she can do not to trail the edge of her heel up the inside of his pant leg. 

She ends up telling him about Mitchell so she can pretend she’s not looking at him exactly how she is, but she sees the hidden shadow of jealousy and disappointment that shows itself in the split second it takes him to get control over himself. He says he’s happy for her and he’s lying. She realises, he’s only just controlling himself and she could probably do it, look at him with hooded eyes and focus, unblinking, on his lips, on the curve where his neck and jaw meet, touch her tongue to her own lips, and she’d have him bucking inside her inside ten minutes.

She brings up Louis’ dictaphone instead. They argue, because they always argue, and they’re not fighting about Esther, not really. 

She’d never say out loud she’s jealous. Instead she says the exact opposite. But she is. And he looks at her, and sees it. He knows, too. He leans on the way she says “as a friend,” to him, repeating it at her, rolling the irony of it over his tongue, blatant and sarcastic. It’s in his eyes, as loudly as if he’d said it out loud. 

You’re not doing this as a friend. 

You’re jealous. 

You want me. 

And, she thinks, _fucking hell, it’s all still there._

It’s pure hurt, she thinks, knowing she’s dragged herself over broken glass to cut him out of her, and in the end, for all of that, for all the hurt and loneliness, all the nights she’s written texts and then deleted them, all the dates she’s gone on trying to find someone who can banish him from her thoughts for a night, after all the times she’s called Rachel so she wouldn’t call him - 

\- he’s still fucking there. 

It takes all her energy not to think that this failure is a sign and that she may as well hurl herself into him. Her fingers twitch around her phone as they pay, while she’s dialling a cab, so close to saying, come home with me. And then, when the cab pulls up, and he hugs her, still stilted and with one arm, she presses her fingers into her thumb, so close to saying, I can’t think of anything but your body. 

If he’s going to kill her, she may as well enjoy the ride. 

He’s either oblivious, or her months-ago ‘you can’t come here’ is still overriding everything though, because she doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t ask. 

She goes home, and calls Mitchell instead, pressing sultry over her worry and frustration and need, asking him what he’s wearing, and she talks him into gruffly laying out his fantasies and working him into telling her where to press and what to say until she makes herself come and has to say Mitchell’s name instead of Harvey’s, and she never thought having sex over the phone with him would make her feel like she was being unfaithful, but it does. Mitchell’s invading the places Harvey lives, invading Harvey’s space and corners, and she’s asked him to, she needs relief, but she also hates it.

She lies, staring at the ceiling instead of sleeping, and wonders how the fuck she found herself in a place where she can’t shake the nagging feeling that she’s cheating on her partner with her own boyfriend. 

-

  
  


She storms out of Louis’ office, fumes all the way home in the back of a cab. She calls the second she’s slammed the door to her apartment shut and she doesn’t even wait for him to say hello before she snaps at him down the phone line. 

He lied to her. He _lied_ to her. 

“How long?” she says, and she had meant to sound harsh, but she hadn’t meant her voice to crack over the last syllable and she hadn’t meant to sound as bitter and tired as she does. 

It’s bitter and tired enough that Harvey takes a full three seconds to respond, and either his mind is working at a million miles an hour or it’s not working at all, maybe he doesn’t even know it’s her, doesn’t recognise her voice. After all, it’s been months. It’s irrational, of course he knows, it’s her name that flashed up on his screen, but still. 

It hurts, just the idea that he doesn’t know her voice as well as he used to. 

The hurt piles on top of the bitter and the tired.

Finally, he says, “...what?”

“How long have you been having them?”

It’s not her, not the calm, patient, understanding person she’s spent years building until it’s second nature for her to be it. There’d been that intention, she thinks, when she’d punched his name into the phone, to bury hurt and to apologise and check in and ask if there was anything she could do. 

She should have known, in the shaking of her finger and the too-hard stabbing at her screen, that it wouldn’t happen the way she’d intended. 

He pauses. It’s the pause he does sometimes, that very specific pause - a deadweight gap, his breath in the air, the pause for when he’s caught, or when he’s trying to fold reality away from the sunlight. He does it to Mike, and Jessica, and Rachel, that pause. But he never does it with her. It’s the first time.

She thinks that hurts the most. 

“How long?” she says again. 

She can hear him swallow, and he says, “Donna -”

“How. Long.”

“A few months.” He says that instead of _when you left_ , but she knows. It’s not hard math. She thinks she knew before he even said it, probably. But the confirmation kicks her hard in the chest and she feels her heart crack up against her ribs. 

“...Harvey. Jesus.” It comes out breathless. Her lungs aren’t working, suddenly. 

She has no idea how to process the rolling sadness and grief, the gut wrenching worry, the heartbreak, and the gnawing guilt simmering underneath it all, because she’d known, as soon as she’d listened to Louis’ stupid dictaphone. She can’t ignore the timeline that it was her walking out the same time his brain caved in, and she knows she had to do it, she knows it would have killed her if she hadn’t, she still knows that. 

But she hadn’t known she was choosing something that might kill him instead. 

He’s quiet, again, and she can’t figure out why, why is he not all bluster and rebuttal, why isn’t he matching her rage with his own, why won’t he just fucking _yell_ so she can yell back, goddamn him, he _never_ reads the fucking room.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she says, filling the silence, fury gritting her teeth together. “I _told_ you I still care about you, and you’re having goddamn meltdowns and you haven’t said a fucking _word_ to me. After everything we’ve been through -”

“Donna.” It’s quiet. He’s flat, hushed, worn through, and she knows he’s done. He doesn’t have it in him anymore, to stop her slinging rocks by pulling a gun. Maybe he never really did. 

Donna realises on the surface, with a start, what’s been unspoken and churning her gut all evening. He hasn’t betrayed her, and she’s not mad at him. It’s not that. 

It’s that she’s terrified. Of him, for him, of the silence and distance and the way they maybe won’t ever close that gap. She’s terrified of all of it. 

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” he says. “I - I didn’t know if I should, or if it was okay to call. I don’t even know what I think about it and explaining it just felt like…” She hears a shift; he’s waving a hand the way he does when words fail him. He trails off with an exhausted hum. 

Along with it, he takes all the burning anger out of her lungs. 

_God, Donna, you’re a prize asshole_ , she thinks. 

“Don’t apologise.” she says. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled at you. I just…” 

She trails off then, herself, because what is she meant to say? She doesn’t know what they are, never has really but especially not now, doesn’t know where they are with each other, and the tentative peace they’ve tiptoed towards at work doesn’t change the way she lies awake worrying about him, or the way she looks down the hallway to Gretchen in her chair, or the way she thinks that if she just tweaked her head enough she’d catch a glimpse of him through the glass. 

She can’t explain it, can’t explain how she’s cut him out but that he’s somehow still there, hanging on grimly, and time isn’t helping anywhere close to the way she thought it would. She can’t explain that everything at work, every last thing, has his fingerprints. Their running gags are bookended in her memory by his giggle. The way the hairs on her neck bristle when something bad is going down are now tuned to Louis, but they were built with Harvey. She can’t explain that he’s still there in everything she does in the office, the way she walks, lengthened strides because his legs are so goddamn long, heels because he’s so goddamned tall, hair brushed out and curled because he unconsciously drew his finger through it, once, late. She can’t explain it. 

She can’t explain 12 years.

“I’m sorry,” she says, finally, and it’s still bitter, but now it’s turned towards herself instead of him.

“It’s not your fault,” he says. It’s gentle, which hurts, because he’s only ever gentle when they talk at night which they don’t do anymore, and he’s being far more generous than he needs to be. She wonders if this is what it’s like to be him, calling late and frustrated and having the other person zero right in on their soul and turn their anger down. 

It’s the first time he’s ever done that, reached right into her fury and extinguished it instead of stoking it, and it’s the first time he feels smaller than her, more peaceful, and she’s never wanted more to be in the same space as him. Her hands ball unconsciously, seeking touch and comfort, and she knows. 

He’s her best friend, and she’s lonely, and she’s worried about him, and she misses him. 

Then, out of the clear blue sky, he volunteers nervously, “I’ve been talking to someone.”

It takes her a moment to register that he probably isn’t talking about anything romantic, he’s not talking about someone he’s dating or a girlfriend, but in the moment that it takes her to figure that out, she feels the hammering gut punch of being made the second choice, of his relentless obliviousness, of the lines and boxes he sketches around her without even noticing. 

“A therapist?” she hears herself saying. It’s half a guess but it’s half a demand, it sounds much more jealous and insecure than she’s expecting, and she’s glad he’s not there to see her grimace. 

“A psychiatrist,” he clarifies. He sounds shy, like he does when he’s trying something new and he’s surprising himself in the middle of it. It’s usually one of the things she loves to see in him, because he’s hardly ever shy and surprising himself with something new, and when he is it’s usually because of her. 

“She’s helping,” he says, and he sounds grateful in a way that feels too close to competition, and Donna feels the sharp and familiar sting of jealousy. Helping him has always been her job. She reminds herself that it was her idea to push him away, that this is the first time he’s spoken to her outside of work in a couple of months because of her, and anyway she’s never had a claim to stake over him, not really. 

She presses so hard down on her churning resentment that she thinks she feels her spine shift around it and tries hard to be more happy for him than she is … whatever the hell it is she’s feeling.

“I’m glad Harvey. And I’m sorry.” 

“It’s not you. I mean, it is. But it isn’t.” She can hear him tripping over his words, speaking and backtracking and so goddamn nervous, and she finds herself both smiling and feeling tears sting her eyes. 

Harvey, trying, has always broken her heart wide open. 

“That’s what she says anyway. It’s all the shit with my mom.” He sighs. “I guess you’ve just been keeping the wolves from the door.”

And Donna thinks, _god Harvey, you have no idea_. 

“Are you going to be okay?” she asks instead. 

He laughs. “I have absolutely no clue.” 

Silence reaches out between them for a too-long moment. It’s awkward, and she hates it. For all the time they’ve known each other, they’ve been almost everything - close, distant, furious at each other and on the verge of being in love, all of it - but never awkward. 

He coughs. “So,” he says.

“So.”

“This doesn’t mean I can call like I used to,” he says, and it’s halfway between a question and a statement. It’s confusing for him, and for her. At work, they’re friendly, even edging towards friends, dinners and jokes and they probably look for all the world like they’re back to normal, even Rachel has mentioned it to her. 

But they aren’t back to normal, not by a long shot. Jokes are still tense, and they still become brittle too easily, they still turn into tense sniping, there’s still boundaries with walls that feel both too high and not high enough. They’ve been testing the waters, finding depth, but she knows 9pm calls will become 12am calls will become _what are you wearing_ and she’s with Mitchell. 

“No. It doesn’t,” she says.

“I guess this is just what normal friends do then, right?”

“I guess.” 

“Okay.” He sounds like he’s been stitched out of regret and heartache.

“I’m glad you’re getting help,” Donna says. She pauses, and then, in a rush, says, “I believe in you, you know. So much.”

“I know. That’s why...” He doesn’t say it’s why he’s fallen apart, because she’s the person who always believed in him so loudly for so long, and then turned from him and disappeared into the silence. 

“I -”

“Good night, Donna. Thanks. Thanks for calling.”

He hangs up. 

  
  


-

She’s back at his desk, but she can’t call, and he won’t, because she told him not to. That’s exactly what she wanted, she thought.

The problem is that it’s too hard having him just in the office. 

She tells herself that’s exactly where he should be - compartmentalised, colleague, work acquaintance. That’s where he belongs. He’d spent so long blurring past every line they’d agreed upon that it had felt normal, but that didn’t mean it was. Harvey was, and is, her boss. They’re close, or at least they have been, but who wouldn’t be after twelve years?

She tells herself, that’s not exceptional, and they’re not unique. There’s nothing they have that any decade-long work relationship wouldn’t. Every work partnership has inside jokes. All of them stay, on occasion, for drinks, or to work late. All of them have a shorthand language that’s just for them, all of them get jokes about dating and marriage. 

They’re not special, she thinks, several times a day. 

He calls, sometimes, when she’s not at her desk. But it’s only ever _where’s the file Gretchen sent over_ or _which pile is the discovery in_ . It’s never _did you hear about Jessica tearing strips off the entire property division_ or _this jazz place is shit_ or _I have a date and my ties all don’t match_. 

She reminds herself this is exactly what she wanted, and hopes the low gut-turn of ‘you’ve made a huge mistake’ will subside at some point. 

When it doesn’t, she starts texting him. 

She tells herself, this isn’t undoing any of the boundaries she’s put in place, because it’s nothing work friends and work colleagues wouldn’t do and besides, she’s with Mitchell, spending her nights at his or him at hers, the sex is good enough to distract her most nights, and there’s no space for late night calls punctuated with shorthand phrases that only make sense if you’re them. Harvey’s no cheater, and neither is she. 

But texting is just texting. 

So she starts sending messages, every now and then, short conversations that say nothing, or maybe everything, like she had when he’d thanked her for twelve years, only every few days instead of just the one exchange they’d had then, left hanging in her message folder. 

She says,

****

**.**

Or she says,

  
  
  


****

  
  


  
  
  


Occasionally, he’ll text her. 

  
  
  


****   
  


  
  
  


  
  
  


**I** ****

  
  
  


  
  


He avoids things, though. He’s stopped casually proposing to her, or saying ‘that’s why you get me’. Even normal questions like if she slept well the night before are suddenly off limits, after he’d asked casually, once, and she’d mentioned she’d stayed at Mitchell’s, and he’d gone studiously quiet as he went over the casework at his desk. 

She breaks it off with Mitchell soon after and tells herself it wasn’t because of Harvey. Mitchell looks at her with a steady, knowing look, and he doesn’t say ‘is this because of him’, but only because he doesn’t have to, because of course it is. Harvey has peppered her conversations and thoughts and he’s asked before, more than once, if there was something between them, believing her less and less when she brushed his questions off. So there’s no point. 

Asking if the gap between them was because of Harvey would be like asking someone who fell if it was because of gravity. 

One night, she tells him. It’s the first thing that’s not work or light hearted banter that she’s told him in months. 

****

****

  
  
  


****   
  


****

  
  
  


****   
  


****

  
  
  


****   
  


****

****

  
  
  


He doesn’t reply to that, but the next day, for the first time since their dinner at Del Posto, he brings her a cup of coffee when he arrives at the office, and says something about the cashier asking him if he had some kind of medically diagnosed sugar deficiency when he ordered it. 

When she smiles, he nods, like that had been the whole plan, him earning a smile from her, and he goes into his office without glancing back. 

  
  


-

He shows up without telling her, without asking, the night before the closing arguments. He’s sorry but not, because he’s panicking, and the thing that surprises her isn’t that he’s there unexpectedly, but that she only feels relief that he is. She missed him, when she was working for Louis and they were estranged. And then they inched their way back towards friendship, or at least being colleagues, and after that, after she came back, they even found a way to take up the same space at work like they used to, power walks and shared coffee and challenges and jokes. 

But he still doesn’t call, and she still misses him. She’d built the walls, but then, without noticing, she’d dismantled them, one by one. With every text, every glance, every time she’d decided to stay a little later at the office, she’d undone them. And then it got to the last one, the wall that ring fences them into the office and into phone calls that are strictly professional, and she’d been waiting, just waiting for him to scramble over it. 

It’s him showing up that feels like that last wall between them is shaking. 

Donna deliberately doesn’t think about all the good reasons she’d built them in the first place. Cutting him out is a wound that hasn’t healed even a little. It didn’t work. She’d failed, at finding the daylight between him and her that she swears was there once, and at digging it back up. Because it hurts more than it helps, walling Harvey out, and at some point in the year, at some point lying and staring at the ceiling, maybe Mitchell was there, or maybe she’d broken up with him by that point, she can’t remember - at some point she’d had two realisations. 

The first was that she’d been right, and if she didn’t keep him at arms length, Harvey Specter was going to ruin her. 

The second was that she didn’t care. 

They pour whisky, they talk. He cries, and so does she, and it’s the first time since she went to Louis, and maybe for a while before that, that she thinks they’ve been honest, really honest, the way they used to be at midnight while the minutes ticked up on their phones. 

She tells him that she thinks he’s worthy, and that she doesn’t want to lose him, and it’s the first time since she walked down the hallway to Louis that she’d said out loud that she was undoing the way she’d tried to cut him out of her. 

He looks like he wants to kiss her, or stay, pull her in for comfort or to push the night away, but he leaves. 

She stands, very still, in the hallway, for long minutes, and then, almost without thinking, she has her phone to her ear and his name pulled up. 

It rings on for a while, clicks to the answer machine, and she says, quietly, “you can call. Whenever you need to. You can call.”

And, an hour later, he does.

There’s not much to talk about. They’d both wrung themselves out earlier over her dining table. They take turns convincing each other it’s going to be okay, then worrying that it isn’t, then falling into stretched silence. 

Eventually, he tells her he missed her, and he sounds so lost and confused at exactly how everything had gone so much to shit that she feels her throat hitch up into her mouth for him. 

She has an inkling that maybe he’s been trying to cut himself out of her as much as she has, and maybe they’ve both just figured out that it’s impossible. Maybe he figured it out first. 

For the first time in months, he falls asleep with his phone on and her on the other end. She listens to his breathing lengthen fitfully, and wrestles with gratitude that it’s him, it’s Harvey, it’s her best friend, nudged up close to her where he belongs, and the sinking realisation in her gut -

that she’s just thrown the towel in, and he’s won. 

-

Mike changes his plea and breaks Harvey clean in half. 

He rages through the office for a solution, battering the law, and her, as he fights oncoming reality, consequences, and his own complicity in it all. He tries everything up to the edge of what’s legal, and then goes over the edge, and she pulls him back, because she always does - only this time he looks at her like he’s angry about it instead of grateful. 

He apologises later, and she tries to throw herself in the firing line alongside him, and he won’t let her. She knows then she’s just about as tangled up in him again as she’s ever been, and maybe the last few months was worth it - at least they aren’t confusing the line between friendship and relationship, between affection and fucking anymore - but maybe it wasn’t. 

And then, later, past midnight, he finally, finally calls. 

“Mike just kicked the shit out of me,” he says. 

“Did you finally work up the courage to tell him his hair looks like garbage?”

He laughs, but it cracks at the end. “I tried to get him to switch places,” he says, bitterness and regret edging in. 

“Again?”

“Dipshit kid never goddamn listens.”

He sounds irritated, immature, and she can imagine him, slouched on his sofa, shirt sleeves rolled up and head leant awkwardly against his shoulder, the way he does when things haven’t gone his way and he’s not in the mood to be gracious about it. It makes her smile, and maybe he’d meant for that. 

“You can’t fall on your sword for everyone, Harvey,” she says. 

“I know.”

“Not even Mike.”

“I _know_.”

“Not even me.”

He’s quiet at that. She can feel him turning that thought over in his head. And she knows what he’s thinking. They’d only just gotten back to something near what they’d been, and maybe even some healthy version of it, clean friendship without all the added mess they’d piled on over the last decade. There’d been a point, months ago, where it had been impossible for either of them to untangle from the other, knotted up into a mass, and unspooling herself from him had been the hardest thing she’s ever done. 

She still misses him, misses the tangle, misses all the glances that it brought, the touches and occasional press of his mouth on hers, but the comfort of being wrapped up in him isn’t worth the pain of cutting him out again. She’s lost, knows it, but maybe if she tries hard enough, she can lose smart. 

“Liberty Rail wouldn’t have changed anything,” he says finally, turning away from the tangle and clean of their … whatever they are. He spins into the law instead, like he always does when the surface is too close to where she’s scratching. “Gibbs doesn’t give a shit about that. She wants me. If we tried to send you down she’d just break you to get to me.”

“You don’t know that,” Donna says. 

“Yes I do.” He’s flat, exhausted, pulling a slight lisp over his words. Donna guesses Mike probably hit him in the face. She guesses Harvey probably deserved it. 

“It wouldn’t help anything, and I’d lose you,” he says. 

“You don’t know you would. There’s still time -”

“ _Goddammit_ , Donna,” he snaps, and a sharp crack echoes through the phone as he slams his hand down on his coffee table. “I _won’t_ lose you. I can’t. Not you and Mike. I can’t.”

“Okay. Okay Harvey. Okay,” she says, in a rush. Harvey, tense, she knows. Harvey, furious, she knows. Even Harvey, edging towards blind rage, she knows. 

Harvey, panicking, desperate and terrified, is a stranger. So she talks him off the ledge. It’s the only thing she can think to do. She says, “We’ll figure this out. I promise.” It’s low, mostly breath, the way she talks when she’s trying to calm him down. If they’d been in the office, she’d have her hand at his elbow. Maybe. She’s not sure if they can touch anymore. 

“Tell me you’re not going to go and do something fucking stupid like call Gibbs.”

“I’m not.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise, Harvey.” And then, picking the underlying fear, she says, “I’m here. I’m not leaving you.”

“You mean you’re not leaving me again,” he says, sullen and shaking out the end of his outburst. 

She’s silent at that. It’s not unexpected, she thinks, for him to push out his fear into what looks like distrust. It’s not fair, not really, but she understands why. He’d said he’d loved her, and he’d run, but he’s not thinking about that right now. He’s thinking about Mike and his own gleeful years of lawbreaking that had suddenly crashed down around him. And he’s thinking about the one variable he hadn’t planned for:

He cares about Mike. 

When Mike had first shown up in that hotel lobby, years ago, with his cheap suits and stupid skinny ties, Harvey had seen something in him. He’d seen his brain, his potential, his audacity. He’d probably seen his humanity, as well, but the way Harvey saw everyone’s humanity - something to be ignored, or, when useful, twisted around his finger and to his advantage. 

Donna had watched him, slowly, get twisted around Mike instead. 

He’s not used to it, having someone throw themselves to the wolves instead of being thrown by him. It’s unsettled him. And then he couldn’t convince Mike to let him take the fall instead, and that level of selflessness isn’t something he’s known, other than Donna. He’s not being fair, but he’s trapped. She understands. 

She’d probably feel the same. 

She lets the silence stretch between them until he sighs.

“I know. I know you’ve got my back. I’m sorry. I’m punchy.”

She nods. “I’m here, Harvey. Whatever happens.”

He sighs, pours himself a drink, and then tells her about his dad, how he took Harvey to follow the Red Sox on all their away games for six weeks in the summer school break, before he moved away for school. 

She makes a cup of tea, then settles onto the sofa, tucks her legs under her, and tries not to think about how, even though the timing of all of this couldn’t be worse, she feels home. 

Harvey is her best friend, and he’s back on the other line. 

  
  


-

  
  


Mike goes down the next day, and the firm collapses. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to Luisa and Aditi, who put together the screenshots for this section and saved me from my pet hate of trying to format text messages in fics. 
> 
> Thanks to Aditi also for editing all the images you see here, the beta, the encouragement and general sass. 
> 
> Thanks to you for reading, and extra thanks to you if you take the time to leave a comment. Reviews are the energy drinks of fanfiction.


	7. Season 6: Of Needing More

He hands her a glass, catches her gaze out the corner of his eye as he sits, much less relaxed than he should be after a night of alcohol and pot, and she knows, in that moment, that it isn’t just her who’s found that the stress of the evening hasn’t dissipated at all with apologies and drinks, but has just slipped from her shoulders to settle low in her stomach.

It happens a lot, with her and Harvey. 

She knows it well. Tonight’s much harder, much more knife-edge than ever before, but they’re no strangers to tension and what-ifs and the way it coils tight around them. In the past, it’s worked out just in lust, and then there was what she thought might have been the beginnings of something deeper than that layered on top, but now it’s something else altogether - hurt, comfort, needing the solid weight of someone you can’t bear to lose on you. He’s threatened to walk, and then he’s come back, but him sitting there in her presence, bouncing his knee against his chair, nursing his tumbler and glancing at her sideways isn’t enough. It’s not enough now, and it wasn’t when he stared her down at the lifts and neither of them could decide if they wanted to fight or fuck. 

Fighting won. Just. 

And now, after that, after she’d thrown down the gauntlet and stalked away, he’d come back, uncomfortably shrugging at her by way of a peace offering. She’s glad that he comes back even though he’s embarrassed more than he’s apologetic. She just needs to know he’s there, really there, and that it’s going to be okay, but she pushes down the way she wants to reach for him, to pass her fingers over the bruise on his cheek and the cut on his lip, to press her mouth and body against his. Because they’re not anything anymore, if they ever were, and she can’t. 

She hates it. 

She hates that she still wants him. She hates the barriers she’s pulled around herself, the ones she’s nearly killed herself for, and she hates herself for hating them. She hates the way he smiles, secret, at her, and she hates when he ignores her. She hates being preoccupied with him, she hates when she forgets him when work is too busy to think of anything else. She hates dreaming of him and hates when she doesn’t. 

She hates it all. 

It all flashes through while Louis is talking about orthodontists and Rachel is talking about Mike, and she only hopes she’s hiding it well enough - she should be, she’s had enough practise - but then Harvey says ‘to trouble’ in the low gravel she usually only hears on the phone at 2am, her stomach coils tight, and she knows if she doesn’t do something now, she’s not going to make it home without pulling him into the cab behind her. 

She excuses herself a moment later, and works hard not to notice the way his eyes track over her when she stands. 

It seems to signal to everyone that dawn isn’t far off, and a couple of hours sleep is better than none, and so the rest of them filter home while Donna busies herself turning off lights and walking the hallways, making mental notes of everything that needs to be done tomorrow to stop the firm collapsing in on itself. It’s not her job, closing up for the night - at least it wasn’t, but nobody else is going to do it, now, and at least it feels like some kind of control. 

Twenty minutes after she hears the lift buzz for the last time, she’s turning off the lights in the bullpen, casting the whole floor in the dim shadow of the emergency lighting. She takes a moment, because the enormity of everything is starting to settle in a pit in her stomach, and she’s realising that this is big, really big, and how the hell is she going to manage everything for the whole firm on top of everything she’d normally do for Harvey? She rounds her desk to collect her bag, preoccupied and with the worst kind of anticipation tensing her muscles, because tomorrow is going to be hard. 

And that’s when he steps out from his office, out of the shadows, and she only gets halfway through a surprised “hey,” before he slips his hand around her elbow, pivots her back against the glass of his office wall, crowds his body up against hers, and kisses her like - well, like the firm’s collapsing around them and none of it matters anymore anyway. 

He presses his mouth over hers, then his tongue, god, his hand slipping from her elbow to drag fingernails up her arm, and she should push him off her, but she drops her coat and bag because it’s inevitable, it’s blind instinct to wrap her arms around his neck. He tastes like whisky, the acrid smell of smoke is clinging to his collar, and she can feel the rough of his split lip under hers. He feels wrinkled, inside and out, the rough of his day-old stubble scratching her cheek, and she can feel adrenaline and exhaustion fighting each other in the way his muscles tense under her palms as she drags her hands down his back. She bites down on his lip, catches the cut that’s nowhere near healed, and he hisses pain at the same time he breathlessly hums pure arousal against her mouth. 

Dimly, she’s aware that all the walls she spent painful months building have all crashed down in a single moment, but he’s warm, heavy, and real, and she doesn’t care.

She can feel his heart hammering against his ribs, and he pushes his hands down her sides, blindly finding her legs under her dress, and in a moment he’s got her cinched up against him, legs around his waist and his hips locking her against the wall. Donna kisses him for a long moment, loose and open mouthed, and it’s so close to all the times she’s dreamed of him doing this that she has to take a moment to remind herself she’s awake. He’s mind-boggling, and she’s torn between the taste of oxygen and the taste of him. Oxygen wins through sheer need, because he’s kissed all the air out of her lungs, and she turns her head to find breath. Harvey pushes his mouth up into the curve of her neck as she does, and she feels the scrape of teeth against her jugular. It’s just the right amount of pressure, just enough scratch from his teeth and cool from the press of his tongue, and it pulls a low, unconscious moan from her. He follows his tongue with his mouth, sucking down firmly, and she hears herself say, “Jesus, Harvey, if you leave a hickey there, I swear to god,” before he steps his hips more firmly against hers and tugs her, settling all her weight to push her centre against his cock, and she forgets how to say every word she ever knew. 

A sharp, deep, unspeakable need punches through her, and she drops her head into his shoulder because she doesn’t have enough focus to hold it upright. She pushes her fingers through his hair, hugs his head into her collarbone, and isn’t sure what to do with Harvey’s guttural whisper of “I missed you,” because he’s probably just talking about the way they chase each other into lust but it also feels too much like thinking about missing him and being missed by him might turn this from a desperate, lusting collision into something meaningful, might haul the thing they’re always flirting with in the dark out into the light, and that’s something neither of them can understand or afford the cost of, not anymore. Liberty was too close and too much. The shadows are safer.

“Shut up,” she says, breath against his ear, before taking his earlobe between her teeth and tugging until he moans deep enough that he’s probably forgotten whatever it was he was trying to say. 

He’s got her braced against his waist, cupping her ass to hold her against him, and he shifts, hooking his hips and belly against hers, pushing the fabric of his pants and her dress between them, it’s friction and it’s not enough but it’s good, so good and right there, Harvey, she says, and she feels herself flush damp against her underwear. 

It’s been too long - too long since she’s had someone against her like this, months - too long since Mitchell and far, far too long since Harvey. Harvey’s overwhelming at the best of times anyway and it’s only a couple of moments of him rocking his hips against her before he finds the right angle and pressure that makes her punch a moan out of her lungs an octave lower than normal. And it’s only a minute or two after that he finds that rhythm that’s just this side of perfect, and she can feel her stomach coiling tightly into the base of her spine, her breath catching faster against her hooked breathing. She can’t decide if she needs him to stop or keep going. She’s torn between the sheer panic that it’s Harvey and her and what the fuck are they doing and the depth of need that’s making every muscle in her body twitch. 

She’s way too old for the feeling of damp fabric pushing against her clit to kick her so close to the edge, and yet. She wants to push him off, because she needs air, and she wants to tear their clothes away so he can sink, properly, inside her, and she can’t do either because the feel of right where she is has shut down every conscious decision except the rock of his hips and the way her walls are clenching in anticipation. Somewhere, she thinks, you’re insane, you’re letting a man you can’t be with dry fuck you into next Tuesday, but she barely manages, “Harvey, I’m -” before her body clamps around an orgasm and yanks her out of reality all together. 

She’s no stranger to sex outside of her own bedroom, no stranger to the vaguely immature pull of lust that takes over before any real chance for foreplay, no stranger to Harvey, even - but this was something else altogether, maybe five minutes in between her rounding her desk to grab her belongings and falling apart with him, not yet quite fully erect, pushing fully-clothed friction between them, and not only that but falling like he’d been worshiping her for hours.

She’s still gone, Harvey punching out breaths against her neck, and she guesses he’s as surprised as she is at how quickly this all happened, and she thinks vaguely that maybe she really is addicted to him, and that she’ll never quite be able to shake herself free.

She’s barely back anywhere where gravity exists when she hears, distantly, the chime of the lift opening at their floor. 

It snaps her back to the present, mostly, though not nearly enough of her synapses fire for her to do anything but panic, and she looks at Harvey in alarm as he turns his head down the hall. She instinctively bumps her nose against his temple, for reassurance or stability or something in between, and it strikes her, the ridiculous domesticity of leaning your face against your lover, like they’re some kind of … something. 

Harvey steps back from the wall, dropping her gently to the ground, hand steadying her elbow until he’s sure her legs aren’t going to shake out beneath her. “Okay?” he murmurs, and at her nod, he walks down the hallway towards the lifts, jamming his hands in his pockets casually but also to hide the obviousness of what he’s just been doing. 

It’s Rachel, spun around so much from the night and everything else that she’d gotten into the cab and halfway home before she realised her keys are sitting on the table in front of Harvey’s sofa. 

Rachel doesn’t look surprised that Donna’s still there, because Harvey is and that’s normal, both of them working late together, and if she suspects something more than work has been happening as she gets close to his office, she doesn’t show it. Donna feels every goosebump from where his skin and mouth had been pushed up against hers a moment ago and feels like it’s ridiculous anybody wouldn’t know exactly what’s been happening between them, but Rachel is distracted or tired or both, and misses the knowing look Harvey gives Donna, and the way he doesn’t blink when he says that Donna was just leaving. 

Donna says, “good night, Harvey. Rachel,” and Rachel nods abent-mindedly in return while she picks up her keys and takes a moment to scan the office for anything else she may have left. 

Harvey watches Donna, holding her gaze as she leaves. Donna heads down the hallway, and as she rounds the corner to the lift, she looks back towards her desk. 

Harvey’s there, staring down the hallway at her, unblinking and openly running his eyes over her, and even from that distance she can read him like a book, and he’s bright and burning like the sun. 

She’s in a lot of trouble. 

Again. 

-

She’s quietly cursing her stovetop under her breath, wrestling with a recipe Rachel swore was ‘super easy’ but that Donna is fairly sure Gordon Ramsay would struggle with when Harvey calls, and says, “he took the painting,” before she even has a chance to say hello. 

Donna blinks. “Who took what?” she says, draping her kitchen towel over her shoulder in a vague approximation of somebody who knows what they’re doing in the kitchen. It’s mainly there to try and prevent the worst of the fallout of the way her kitchen has a way of humbling her and her dinners have a way of ending up all over her sweats. 

She glances at the clock. It’s not even 9 pm, and that’s unusual. Harvey never calls about things that aren’t work before 9. He’s probably still in the office.

“Stemple,” Harvey says, and she can hear him trying, failing, to keep unsteadiness out of his voice. “He took the painting.”

“Your moms?”

“Yeah.” She hears him pull a shaking breath over his lungs. There’s something in the exhale, something he murmurs,  _ oh my god _ or  _ holy shit _ or maybe it’s just his vocal chords rattling against his chest; she’s not sure, but it’s about as awful a sound as she’s ever heard from him. 

He never talks about it, but she knows Harvey. Harvey drops relationships, people, everything like they don’t matter, even when they should. He breezes through attachments like teflon, letting things he should hold on to slide off him, the things that would weigh anyone else down he brushes off like they’re air. Harvey doesn’t do attachment, he doesn’t do nostalgia, he doesn’t do sentiment. Caring makes you weak, and what is sentiment but caring wrapped up in baggage?

There’s only two things Harvey admits to, only two things that hint at any sense that he cares about anything from the past he has tangled up in his parents. His dad’s albums, and that painting. 

He sounds, for the first time since she’s known him...heartbroken. 

“Oh, Harvey,” she says. She thinks,  _ I’m so sorry _ , but she doesn’t say it, because he’d just turn her sympathy away if she said it too loudly. She knows him in his hurt, knows his pain, knows how he’s flinched away from her touch when Gordon died, how he disconnects touch from love, and when he’s on the phone he does it too. He hates her trying to tease his emotions to the surface. So she doesn’t. 

There’s a long, silent moment. She sits back against the bench, waiting in the space. Sometimes, he just wants the quiet.

“Did I ever tell you about the day she painted it?” he says, eventually.

“No, you never did.”

“Mmm.” She hears him sigh, sitting back in his sofa or at the edge of his desk, letting the exhaustion of the day seep out of his bones. “My dad was out on the road. Long stretch. He was sitting in with this band out of New Orleans, thought it was his big break. He thought every gig was his big break. He’d take anything for any pay, because he always said, ‘you never know who’ll be there watching’. Which was great, but it meant there was never much coming in, financially. Things were tight at home. We never had much growing up. Artists for parents.” He laughs. “They thought being impoverished was some kind of grandiose statement on only needing love or art or community or some shit.”

“Was it?”

“Fuck no,” he says, and it’s so off-handed that Donna smiles. “It was just what happens to everyone when they’re poor. Mom and dad were always stressed, they fought about money, I felt bad for wanting anything the other kids wanted and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t have it. Lots of clothes from charity shops that mom swore I’d grow into, getting my face kicked in at recess for not having whatever lunch box was cool that week, the usual.”

Donna hums. She knows. She didn’t start out in the place Harvey was born into, but she wound up there, and she knows the weird mix of pride and shame that burns its way into your soul when you have to show up to school with clothes that don’t fit or look right. It’s when she’d learned people, all those years of navigating the complexities of teenage existence without the safety net of money and the anonymity it affords you. 

Harvey had too. He’d learned people the same way she had, only she’d learned how to embrace people in a way that helped them see past her hand-me-downs and the tiny apartment she went home to, and Harvey had learned to build walls. 

“But dad got this gig,” Harvey said, “and he got a bit of cash in advance. Bought mom some canvases and paint for the studio. She was so excited, she usually didn’t get so many fresh supplies all at once. It was a Saturday. Dad had left a couple of days before. It was raining out. My ball game got cancelled, and mom had these fresh paints and…” She can feel him shrug. “We just sat with the rain on the windows and she painted. And no one was talking about money, or how to make the rent, or what groceries we could afford, or if dad should take work with a local construction crew, and I felt… safe.”

He pauses, working his words over, and he sounds almost embarrassed when he says, “It was the only time I ever really felt like that.”

Donna realises, all at once, that he’s never felt safe, other than that, ever, that there’s not a moment she’s known him when he’s ever been really relaxed. For a second, she wonders, bitterly, why she’d never noticed it before. Harvey is so good at pretending he’s at ease in every situation that she’d never even stopped to think that every inch of it was all just smoke and mirrors.

She has to fight the urge to get in a cab and go straight to him.

“I’m sorry, Harvey,” is all she can think to say, out loud this time.

He’s quiet, but she can hear his breath punching slow out of his lungs, and she feels like she can hear his jaw clenching against the unfairness of it all. “Harvey,” she says.

“I feel like I let them all down,” Harvey says, haltingly. 

“Your family?”

“Yeah.” It’s only just above a whisper. He’s working hard, so hard, to bury whatever he’s feeling. 

“I know I’ve never met your mom,” Donna says. “But I knew Gordon. Harvey, I never met anyone prouder of their kid than he was of you. He loved you to pieces.”

It takes him about fifteen seconds to work up enough breath to manage, “thanks, Donna,” and he hangs up without saying goodbye.

A couple of days later, he texts, suggesting they find a replacement painting. 

She tells him maybe the space on the wall is okay for now. 

-

They hold hands after Jessica leaves and she asks him if he’s going to be okay, and it’s a moment.

It’s weird, how much it feels like something, how significant it is. It shouldn’t. They’ve kissed, they’ve spent sweated hours on the phone telling each other fantasies they’ve never told another living soul, he’s made her come a few feet away and a few weeks ago, pressed damp and gasping against the glass. All of that they’ve done, circled around, pressed towards and then found reasons to keep walking away from, but it’s still them, it’s still what they do, and it’s still much more than this.

So why, she thinks, in this moment, does the feel of his knuckle bumping against her skin, and then his hand wrapping around hers, fingers pressing into her palm, feel like the entire world shifting in its axis? He’s there, real and not going anywhere, his face a mix of peace and grief, she can’t figure out if she’s comforting him or if it’s the other way around and god, his hands are so much bigger than hers, big enough to feel safe.

He takes her hand, and she feels the core of him lean in to her, and he... settles. 

Nothing’s okay, in that moment, not really. Jessica’s leaving, the firm is still shaking on its foundations, and Harvey looks like the weight of it all has landed squarely on him, because it has. She can’t say it’s going to be okay, and so she doesn’t say anything - they’re beyond platitudes and even if they weren’t, Harvey is too smart to fall for them or to find any comfort in them. 

But he settles. The pressure of his hand around hers tugs on her wrist as he relaxes his weight into her bones, and she swears that she feels his soul take a breath. 

Something shifts in her right in that moment, and it shifts with a certainty she’s only felt every now and then. It’s a feeling that’s so sure that in the past she’s thought it might be some latent kind of clairvoyance she just hasn’t dug out of her properly, because she doesn’t believe in clairvoyance. But even though she doesn’t believe in it, she’s come to trust that particular feeling, the shift of certainty in her. And she’s certain. 

He’s it, and she knows it.

She’s it, and he knows it too.

There’s some future, some distant somehow, where things are different and not what they are now, where she’s not his secretary and he’s not her boss, where he’s not twisted and fucked up from the brutality of work and childhood abuse, a somehow where they are all the things that terrify them now. There’s a somehow in front of them somewhere that isn’t illicit phone calls and stolen glances, but morning coffee and gentle love, laughter pressed into it because of the joy that’s replaced the shame. There’s a somehow where their tangled fingers are okay and they knock, metal on metal, his wedding rings scraping hers, making marks, leaving changes that show in the same way he’s changed her. There’s a somehow where she’s changed him, actually changed him, and that shows too. There’s a somehow where everything, all the stress and the hurt and the denial has faded out and they just remember all the times they’ve laughed, they remember the banter and smiles and the way they wasted hours together on their way through the days, friends to lovers, and none of the inbetween. 

It’s too much to say it’s her future flashing in front of her eyes, because it isn’t. She’s still right here, aware of him, his presence, his touch, the tilt of his head, the shaken exhaustion reaching her through his grip. She’s not being transported to an imagined future, because it isn’t imagined. It just is, and like she knows the night comes before the dawn, she knows that she is his and he is hers. 

They stand for a long moment, and eventually it’s him that lets go. He turns towards her, just his head, looks right into her. He looks curious, like he’s realised she’s it all at once, but like he doesn’t trust it, and he pushes his fingers into a fist like he wants to say something but can’t find the words. 

Donna holds his gaze, and shakes her head, just once, just slowly. There’s no need. 

She touches his arm, nods good night, and leaves. 

He doesn’t call for a few days after that. 

-

He calls the second night he’s in Boston, and it’s also the second night she’s been lying awake worrying about him. She’s expecting him to be sad, or confused, sulking, or maybe relieved. 

He isn’t. He’s  _ furious _ . 

He’s already midway into a fuming soliloquy when she answers, and she barely gets ‘hello’ out between muttered expletives. 

“Harvey,” she says, but he’s not listening. She suspects he isn’t even fully aware he called her, and he definitely doesn’t need her for the one-man diatribe he’s constructing from lingering anger that feels as well-trodden as the carpet between her desk and his.

“Harvey,” she says again, and her voice sounds much more patient than she feels. 

Harvey doesn’t even break flow; she’s definitely not needed, she thinks. He rounds on some of the most creative insults she’s ever heard and she can hear him angrily pacing the short length of what she guesses is whichever room he’s staying in for the night. She’d be impressed by his vocabulary, if he wasn’t skirting the edges of what she’d call unhinged. 

“Bobby,” Harvey says, slipping the name into his tirade by way of explanation. “Fucking guy wanted to take a swing at me. Me. In my own brother’s house. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t  _ believe _ it.” 

“Harvey.”

“That rat bastard mother _ fucker _ .”

“ _ Harvey _ .”

“ _ What _ .”

“Did you just call me for an audience or is there some kind of a point that you’re homing in on?” she says evenly.

Her reasonable sarcasm seems to knock the wind out of him somewhat, and she hears him sigh. “Sorry,” he says, and he has the presence of mind to sound vaguely embarrassed. 

“I take it things haven’t gone as well as you’d hoped.” She settles back against her headboard, shoulders propped up. She hears him do the same, and she tries not to pluck at the corner of her pillow. 

Even after all these years, he still makes her worry.

“Lily,” he says, as if that name says everything. “I had dinner… was meant to have dinner with her. I told her I was ready to forgive her and then she had the nerve to say she deserved forgiveness from  _ me _ . Me. After all these years and everything she’s done, she wants me to apologise. To  _ her _ .”

He tails off, breathing harder than he should be, and she knows he’s waiting for her to sympathise, like she does, like she always has. 

She’s silent, because Lily isn’t wrong. Harvey’s hurt and hurting, but she’s watched him let his pain tear at him for so long that it’s become a part of Donna as well, and it’s so tiring, seeing him hurt, being hurt in turn. Harvey circles in on her and then backs away, says he loves her and runs, looks at her like he knows she’s forever but hoods his eyes with friendship. She understands the fear better than he thinks she can, and he wears scars that Lily’s carved into the folded away parts of him, but she also thinks that not fighting back against it is him and not her.

Harvey’s wounded, but he’s also standing outside a hospital and refusing to walk in because he wants pain to remind him he’s different, and they’re both exhausted. 

The exhaustion is on him, Donna knows, and Lily isn’t the only person he needs to apologise to for that. Lily’s given him good reason to be scared, but it’s still Harvey choosing cowardice over courage and calling it ethics.

Harvey doesn’t notice her silence. “We got into an argument. I left the restaurant, and Bobby came by the house and tried to pick a fight with me. Fucking asshole.”

“Harvey,” Donna says, and she can’t keep the edge of tired impatience out of her voice. “You need to move through this.”

“Do I shit.”

“What else are you going to do? Get in a fist fight with your family every time there’s a wedding or a funeral or a special occasion?”

“Bobby is  _ not _ my family.”

“Yes, he is, Harvey,” Donna says, and she finds herself sitting up straighter. “Lily made him part of the family. You might not like it, but that’s what it is. And if you’re going to make your peace with her you’re going to have to make peace with him too. It’s on you now, Harvey. You’re the one dragging this on. You can’t keep on like this.”

It takes a moment before he says, “I know,” quietly. 

“It’s going to kill us if you don’t deal with this.”

He pauses. “Us,” he says.

Donna knows too well the undercurrent he’s leaning into. It’s a conversation they’re always nearly having, but never quite. They’d nearly done it, before Liberty Rail, but she thinks they’re both gun shy now. It feels like saying it out loud again will just invite some other pile of shit to land on them.

Us.

It’s complicated.

One day, she knows, they’ll both have to have enough courage to lean into that conversation at the same time again.

This time though, she leans out.

“I’ve been by your side a long time,” she says instead. “We all have. Jessica, Rachel, Mike… Harvey, it’s hurting all of us now.”

“I know,” he says, and she can hear that he does. He knows. He’s ignored himself and buried everything for so long that he almost believes he’s the thing he shows everyone - cold, calculating, the best closer in New York and impervious to anything other than money or gambling. But he knows. “I know,” he says again, murmurs it to himself. 

“For better or worse, they’re family,” she says. She almost says  _ like Louis _ , but thinks better of it. Harvey and Louis are still finding each other again after Jessica left and cratered their relationship. 

Harvey sighs. “Like Louis,” he says, reading her mind. 

“Like Louis.”

“Like goddamn Louis.”

Donna smiles, almost against her will. Harvey is beyond frustrating, slow on the uptake, and as stubborn as anyone she’s ever met, but he’s trying. “Talk to her tomorrow, okay? I know you still want to.” He wouldn’t have still been there if he hadn’t, she guesses. He’d be calling her on the train back or on his way to the airport, or maybe pounding on her apartment door, demanding whisky and absolution. 

“I really hate it when you do that,” he says. 

“No you don’t.”

“Yeah, I don’t.” There’s a moment of quiet, and then he says, quite out of nowhere, “I miss you.”

She says without thinking, “I miss you too.” It comes out automatically, like she’d say it to anyone, and it’s so quick off her tongue that she only catches what she’s saying after she says it. She freezes, and hopes that her response had come out casually enough to brush past. 

Apparently, it’s too casual, and Harvey punches a breath out his lungs. “No,” he says. “I miss you.” He sounds frustrated, like he’s wearing stress in every bone, and the pressure of everything is pushing truth through him almost against his will. “I…  _ miss _ you. Everything’s changing. Jessica and Mike and … everything’s changing.” He’s fighting with his words and everything sitting between them that he doesn’t have the courage or the cognisance to say. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” she says, pulling his fears out of the ether. 

He laughs, but it’s more wistful than anything. “Maybe if you were here I wouldn’t have tried to beat the shit out of Bobby.”

“I don’t know,” she says. “You’re pretty stupid.” She hears him hum down the line like he does when he doesn’t quite have it in him to return the joke. “You’re doing a good thing, Harvey,” she continues. “I know this is hard. I know all of this is different and unexpected. I get it. But I also know you. You’ll figure it out.”

He hums again, admitting defeat. He does that when he doesn’t want to outright agree with her. Normally she finds it endearing, but tonight, it just feels hard, because it’s hard to think about how they hardly have to talk, even though they choose to. They just know each other. They’re built like they’re made to go together, always have, and even though neither of them are the same as when he caught her eye across a bar a dozen years ago, they still fit. But there’s something firing up under the surface, that might be him, and it might be her, she’s not sure, but she’s looking at the horizon, and for the first time in a long time, just seeing Harvey isn’t quite enough. 

She thinks about how everything is so close to working between them, and she also thinks about how it doesn’t work nearly as well as it used to. Harvey is getting tiring. It’s not that he doesn’t contain worlds. It’s just that so does she, and she knows there’s more. She loves him, still does, always will, but it’s getting harder and harder to be satisfied with that. 

Donna knows two things. 

The first thing is that she and Harvey are soulmates. 

The second thing is that that might not matter. 

“So,” Harvey says, breaking into the silence, and she still feels a flip when he speaks. 

“So,” she says. 

“I should go.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Bye, Donna.”

She doesn’t know how long he sits and thinks after she talks to him, but she doesn’t sleep. 

-

She calls him, late, in the night after her meeting for The Donna goes well and then suddenly collapses. She doesn’t say hi or ask him how he is, and she doesn’t tell him what happened, she just says, are you alone, and when he says yes, she says, take your clothes off.

He does. He likes it when she orders him, she knows. He likes when her voice edges around domination and demand. He likes being in control, but he likes when she pulls control away from him as well. “God, it’s fucking hot when you talk like this,” he says, and she just tells him to shut up and run his thumb over the head of his cock and imagine she’s fully clothed still, nudging her panties out the way to sink down on him. 

He tells her he has a fantasy where she cuffs him to the bed and teases him until he loses his mind. He’s also told her about fantasies of doing the same to her. Harvey’s all about control, and she thinks letting her have it in the same way he does is a form of love, at least, but she doesn’t want to think about that tonight. Tonight is lust, oblivion, it’s feeling like she has the advantage somewhere. Mostly, it’s feeling wanted. This she knows - no matter what, Harvey will always want her, even if she does have to split herself into parts for him. 

She pushes, wanting more, seeing if there’s lines he’ll back away from. She tells him about her mouth on his cock, about fingers pressed around and inside him, and he huffs at that, because she’s still right in the middle of all the things he gets off on. So she talks about toys, about his cock, about both together, about having him sink himself inside her with her hips propped up on pillows, tells him she wants to hold his gaze while he slicks himself inside her ass and pushes a vibrator up inside and against her walls, and he loses the ability to respond to her other than saying her name as he strokes himself. 

She realises they’re probably both a lot more adventurous in bed than the one night they’d had together had revealed. She wonders vaguely how she’s only just realising that now, and wonders if there’s any area of her life where she hasn’t undersold what she wants to Harvey. She pushes away the bittersweet of that thought.

She holds out for ten minutes and him saying “Donna, please,” several times before she slips her hand into her underwear and lets his voice and breath make her slick over her fingers. 

He falls apart first, and it’s the thought of him, sprawled over his bed and coming over his hand and stomach that makes her follow a few moments later. 

-

Donna tells Harvey she wants more, and when she does she can see him reeling off a panicked, imagined list of what the hell she might mean by that. She’s not sure herself, and it rattles him enough that he doesn’t talk to her again outside of work for a couple of weeks, until Thanksgiving, and even then she’s not sure that he’ll call, but he does. It feels almost normal, like it always has, except that it also doesn’t, because Donna had finally said out loud that she needs more than just him, and she’s not sure how either of them are coping with it. 

“Hey,” she says, their usual greeting in her usual spot, tucked up in the quiet of the evening in front of the fireplace. 

“Hey. Are you fat?”

“Getting there. Are you drunk?”

“Working on it. How’s your family?”

“They’re good. Ate themselves to sleep about an hour ago.” They’d really outdone themselves this year. Her dad had fallen asleep during dessert and hadn’t even made it to nightcaps. The house smells like pumpkin and cinnamon, and the whole place is silent except for the crackling of the fire and Donna murmuring into her phone. 

“Not you?” Harvey asks.

“I was waiting,” she says. “For you to call.” 

“Yeah?” She can feel the familiar playful arching of his eyebrow through the phone. 

“Shut up.” She tucks away the doubt that he might not have called behind the joke. Things have shifted between them this year. It’s not bad, exactly. Just different. They’re still close, there’s still moments between them where time stops in the spark, he still asks her what she’s wearing every now and then, and they still slip into the visceral, working each other into fantasy and expletives. But there’s something else now, even more layers stacking on top of the ones already there, dozens of months over dozens of years. She’d call it intimacy, but that’s not quite right. Whatever it is, it’s profound, a shifting of the firmament beneath them both that she doesn’t have a word or a definition for. She can’t put her finger on it, so she doesn’t expect him to be able to either.

They fit still. But it’s all in the old, the parts of them that fit. The new things jar - not enough for them to fight, or drift; it’s just enough to feel like the sands are shifting. Mostly, she just wants more, and she wants to know what more is. Her heart isn’t giving up the answers yet. 

It’s all fucking confusing.

“I just… I haven’t spoken to you for a while, and there’s so much happening,” she says. “Mike and everything. It’s a lot. And I hope you’re okay.”

“I’m okay,” Harvey says. “Really.” She hears him clatter glass on marble as he pours himself another drink. It’s not late enough that he’s loose, but he’s relaxed in the way he gets at the end of a big trial or a long night. She hears him sit back in his chair, sip his drink, and breathe out a long sigh. “Another bullshit year, huh.”

“Another bullshit year.” Donna sips her own whisky and doesn’t think about how, a dozen years ago, even five years probably, it would have been wine. She swallows, thinks about how she doesn’t even grimace anymore, the way she did when he first moved to his desk at the DA’s office, and thinks about how she feels like she’s shifted slightly on her own foundations. He’s pressing his fingerprints into her, slowly but surely, and she laughs unconsciously as she thinks about it.

“Hmm?” Harvey asks.

“Oh.” She shrugs. “I was just… I don’t know. Wondering when everything is going to feel normal again.”

Silence settles between them. They both know that ‘normal’ isn’t the right word, not really. Whatever’s between them hasn’t been normal for a long time, if it ever was. It’s just that now things are starting to diverge, a little. Because when Harvey says normal he means stagnant. Harvey feels safest when things stay the same, and it’s not enough for Donna anymore. 

She loves him, in any combination of words she can think of. She adores him, cherishes him, she knows him. He is her soulmate. 

And it’s not enough. 

As if he’s reading her mind, Harvey says, “Do you know what more means yet?”

“What makes you ask that?” she says, and wonders if he’s started to learn what her silences mean in the same way she knows his. 

“Things feel different. Between us.”

She’s not sure what to say to that, so she just hums noncommittally. Harvey has moments of clarity and incisiveness, where he lands on the right words and where he finds a way to show his heart without letting it crack in half, and she thinks he’s circling in on one. 

Harvey, wrapped up and contained, is familiar. Harvey, bare and open and in the middle of a revelation, is terrifying. 

“Things aren’t ever going to be the same again, are they?” he asks. “Not really.”

She starts to tell him, of course things will be the same, to offer trite comfort, but they’re beyond that, and have been for a while, so instead she just shrugs, and says, “... no, Harvey, I don’t think they are.”

“But we’re okay?” He sounds like he needs reassurance, and that’s not like him. Even vulnerable, Harvey isn’t in the habit of questioning her, or how she is with him. 

“Yeah, we’re okay,” she says, and she isn’t sure how to feel about the way he lets a breath out like he was afraid she’d say there was a chasm opening up between them and no bridge in sight. 

Then, in the quiet, he volunteers, “I dreamed I kissed you.”

“You … you what?”

“I mean. I dreamed we were… together. Just after Jessica left.” 

He tells her the details, and it sounds somewhere between a confession and a question. His shirt, coffee, a lazy Friday morning, and it’s nothing like a dream she would have expected Harvey to have. It all sounds … domestic. She’s slipping somewhere from his carefully constructed boundaries where there’s a Donna he’s friends with, and another Donna that he fucks, and it’s all blurring together. 

If she wasn’t sitting on the hollow knowledge that only having Harvey on her horizon isn’t enough anymore, she might have felt hope. 

She thinks he knows how shitty the timing is as well, because he hesitates, takes another breath, then says, “do I need to, I don’t know…”

“What?”

She can feel his shrug down the phone line. “Get over you?” She can hear the grimace in his words as he says it, once again stumbling over the most simple and inadequate term for the thing that sits, unmoving, between them.

“Over you,” she says back to him.

“I mean… I don’t know. Not over you. I just…”

“I know, Harvey.”

It’s so close to admitting, out loud, what they almost are, and at the same time, he doesn’t mean those words the way anyone else would, because he isn’t pining and he isn’t in love, not in the way that means something. He just keeps stumbling over her when he’s least expecting to. They’re not ‘that’, but they’re not  _ not _ that, and she knows he can’t see his way to anyone else while he’s tangled around her, even in the spaces where he’s not whispering darkly that he wants to fuck her senseless in her own bed. 

She says, “I don’t know. Maybe.” He’s asking a question she never thought he’d ask, and she doesn’t know how to answer him, because she wants to say, no, you stupid asshole, I don’t want you to get over me, but she also knows he’s probably never going to have the courage to pull the Donna he loves and the Donna he fucks together. He had his chance, a year ago, and he panicked. 

He’s not in love and he’s not anywhere near ready to be. Maybe he won’t ever be. 

“Maybe,” she says again. 

He’s quiet for a long moment. “Okay,” he says, after minutes. “I’ll try.” But he doesn’t sound convinced. 

That lulls her into a false sense of sameness, and so it’s months before she finds out he tries with Paula. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading this now way out of hand thing. 
> 
> Thank you to Luisa, for the insight, the discussion, the late night Darvey philosophising, and the beta. 
> 
> Thank you to Aditi, for the encouragement, the ideas, the belief, the beta, and the adorable freakouts. 
> 
> Thank you for taking the time to leave a comment or review, or for reaching out. Life is really busy right now, and I don't have as much time to respond to all of you, but know that you taking the time to comment really does mean the world.


	8. Season 7: Of Inbetween

She had started to think, maybe. 

She’d told him she wanted a seat at the table, and she’d gotten it. Fits, starts, false beginnings and the cold sweat of having him accept the thing she thought he never would have before he came to his senses aside, she’d gotten it. She felt different after that. It was mostly the job, mostly what Mike had said, mostly that it was about damn time. 

And they’d talked, not long before that, about moving on from each other, from whatever it was they were doing, and he’d said, I’ll try, and he is trying. Even still, she knows that some of what is making things feel different is that she doesn’t work for him any more. 

Being with someone she works _for_ is never. 

But being with someone she works _with…_

He looks at her differently as well, then, kind of. He still respects her, still glances at her for yes and for no, still fights her (in front of Louis now, but she supposes that’s part of the gig) and still fights for her, but he’s not trying to hide it now. 

And every time he’s open where he never used to be, or asks her to have a drink with him with something different behind his voice, or calls her at night and talks to her without the gritted, awkward self consciousness of the last couple of years, she thinks, maybe. 

He’s stopped calling to ask what she’s wearing, to tell her to take her clothes off and touch herself, since she’s moved roles and moved from his desk. She’d panicked, at first, then reminded herself he’d said he was going to try to get over her, and this was that, at least. But then, he’d looked at her differently, and she thinks that this might be something else all together. Maybe things are changing, and he’s not over her, and maybe he doesn’t want to be. Maybe they’re just about to get their shit together, she thinks. He’s been different, lately. 

There’s a point, when she’s stopped him from making some huge mistake, again - he’s making lots of those, lately, that he looks at her, and she looks at him, and it really seems like something has shifted, and that he might just be learning to look at her _that_ way, out in the light when it’s not hidden by handsets and midnight.

Maybe. 

In the mirror on a Monday night, taking her earrings off, she looks at herself, and finally lets herself say, out loud, the first word she’s ever said to herself that held any hope for something more. 

“Maybe,” she says. 

On Tuesday, he walks into her office and tells her about Paula. 

And she thinks, maybe that’s why he’d said yes to her being a senior partner when she’d thought he’d never. Maybe it’s not that he’s scared. 

Maybe he really has changed. 

And she wishes she knew less. Wishes she knew him less well. Wishes he didn’t know every fiber of her. 

Maybe then they could have had something. 

-

The Paula thing cracks her in the chest, and Donna forgets how to breathe when Harvey tells her. She tries to remember how to inhale and exhale as she lies to him about knowing and then admits she doesn’t, she tries to remember as she gives his key back, and she tries to remember as she sits in her office twelve feet from him and feels twelve years from him. 

But even from twelve years away, he still fucking calls past midnight. 

“The key works,” he says, when she answers, the same night she had given it back and they’d both left the office separately and without speaking to each other again. 

“Glad to hear it.”

“How are you going to check up on the cactus now?”

“Harvey, you know I can still get into your place anytime I need to.”

He laughs at the idle threat, pauses, says, “so.” She hears him sit and blow a breath out from his cheeks. 

“So.” She tucks her feet up, leans her temple on her palm, finding the right angle in the corner of the sofa. There’s a moment, where she can hear the cogs in his brain turning, figuring out how to raise the tension of the person in between them. 

Donna does it instead, says, “Paula?” She’s always had to be the person who says the secret into the silence. 

“Yeah, Paula.”

“I really am happy for you.” It sounds even less sincere in the atmosphere than it felt when she held it in her lungs and tried to will into reality. So she moves on quickly, says, “did she like the Ferrari? How easily did she let you sweep you off her feet? That is exactly what you did, right? You never said.”

Harvey laughs, says, “yeah, you got it in one.” She hears him scratch at the hair at the base of his neck. He says, “you always know what’s going on, even when you don’t,” and then, almost to himself, says, “Paula does that too.”

Donna doesn’t answer, because she’s swallowing past a sudden catch in her throat. Jesus, this is happening, she thinks. This is really happening. This isn’t Zoe, who wasn’t right for him, or Scottie, who was too right for him and scared him enough that he ran. Paula, she thinks, is just the mix of not-right and right. Paula’s similar enough to Donna for him to fall into the same comfort he’s always needed, but she’s different enough that he can fool himself into the belief that he’s not still circling Donna and breaking his elbow to hold her at the right distance, the way he always has. 

She doesn’t say the reason she knew about the Ferrari and the outfit and sweeping her off her feet is because she’s imagined him doing it to her, a hundred times over. She’s lost track of the amount of times she’s woken up from dreaming, or snapped back to reality at her desk, thinking about him. Sometimes it’s what it’s been in the past - thoughts and dreams of him staring at her, pupils blown black, subdued violence in his fingers as he pulls her clothes off and claims her. But more and more, it’s him, showing up at her door, looking at her like things have changed, like he’s changed, like he’s come to his senses and realised something that’s going to ripple out through forever. 

She hadn’t predicted anything. She’d just told him what was locked in her heart. 

That’s what hurt the most, knowing someone else had her soulmate and her fantasy. 

“You sure you’re okay, Donna?” Harvey asks, and she realises she’s been silent longer than she thought. 

“Yeah, Harvey, I’m o-”

“- because we need to talk about us.” He interrupts, says it all at once, like he knows if he doesn’t just say it now he’ll never find the courage. 

“Us,” Donna says. 

“I mean.” He huffs, frustrated. “I know there’s not an ‘us’. But… some of the things we do? When we talk, or ... It has to stop.”

“I know,” she says, trying not to sound indignant. “We always do, when…” 

She trails off. When you have someone to distract you? When you’re pretending whoever you’ve got in your bed is me? When you’re trying to forget that I’m the one you keep coming back to? What?

“I don’t mean just then. Not just the gaps.” He gives himself a moment, as if he’s trying to find words he can’t, then says, like he knows it’s inadequate, “I like Paula.”

“I know you do.”

“No. I _really_ like her. I want it to work with her. I feel like I’ve got a shot to put all the shit that’s happened behind me and do this well.” He swallows. “The thing is, that sometimes, when I’m with her, I… I still think of you.”

Donna’s heart twists around itself into a knot. She thinks back, unbidden, to years ago, the first time he’d rung her and started the conversation with ‘hi’ before ending it with throated moans and both of them trying to catch their breath. She thinks of how he’d said _I thought about you when I fucked Scottie_. Thinks about the way she’d felt her heart twitch when he said he’d nearly said her name instead. It had felt wanton, charged, so goddamn sexual at the time that she’d thought about it for days. 

Now it just feels hollow, unwanted, like Donna is an anchor he’s trying to shake off. 

“I don’t know what to say to that,” she says, because she doesn’t. 

“I’m not… accusing you of anything. But you’re in here. Inside me, I guess. I need to find a way to…”

“Cut me out?”

“Yeah. And I can’t do that if I feel like you’ll still be there if it doesn’t work out.”

“I am not your Plan B, Harvey,” she snaps. _Fucking asshole._

“I know. I know,” he says, quickly, and he’s not rising to the bait she suddenly realises she’s throwing out. Harvey and her, it’s always been either fighting, flirting, or fucking, and she’s trying to scramble. 

She thinks, she’s just as bad as him, pushing him away and pulling him back, because lying to yourself has a way of making you spin in place. 

Harvey is so worn out from it all that she can hear his sigh, weary, through the phone. “You just… you feel too much like Plan A, sometimes.”

She realises, he’s trying. He’s trying, and it’s for someone else, but he’s still trying. She’d said to him once, she wanted him to be happy, and she had also said that it wasn’t up to her to decide what that meant. And she knows, this is that moment, right in front of her, and she knows she’d told herself, if it ever came down to it, she’d have to step out. If he needed it, she told herself, she’d step out. 

He’s trying, trying to do the right thing, and she’d always hoped he’d get there. 

She just had never really thought he’d get there without wanting her with him. 

She shakes her head, just because he can’t see it. She lets the disappointment out into the world for a moment, because she’s alone. 

“Friends, then,” she says, finally. 

“Friends,” Harvey says, then, after a quiet moment, “thanks, Donna.”

-

The thing is, he keeps calling. And other than the fact he stops pouring whisky and dragging the words _I’m going to make you come_ over the bottom of his throat, it’s the same as it’s ever been.

He calls to make sure she knows there’s a revival of Streetcar starting at St. Ann’s and tells her he can get tickets for them if she wants. Apparently Gillian Anderson is a revelation, which is something he must have read because he’d never put those words together by himself. 

He calls on the anniversary of his dad’s heart attack, and he sits in the silence with her. 

He calls to ask if the red tie goes with the grey suit, and when she says, you look better in the navy, he grouches that she always says that, but he has the navy suit on when he gets to the office. He still pretends it wasn’t her idea to wear the blue, and he still smiles behind his eyes as he denies it.

He calls when there’s shows they both like on the television, or when there’s shows they both hate, and cajoles her into turning it on so they can make fun of it together. They make the same drinks at the same time and murmur into the lengthening night, about actors and directors and everything else that should mean nothing. 

He still brings bagels and coffee into the office in the morning, still tells her she’s going to get diabetes when he passes over her standard order, and he still calls from pizza stands at 10pm to tell her he’s finally found the perfect slice and this time he’s sure. 

Sometimes he mentions Paula, and he doesn’t seem to notice how Donna goes quiet when he does. 

Other than Paula, other than the fact he’s not telling her to take her dress off, it’s the same hollow in between, the same space where if Harvey called her Donna or called her honey it would fit either way. 

Harvey thinks it’s boundaries, because Donna builds walls with ‘no’ but Harvey builds them with women. 

Dissonance sits a lot easier on Harvey than it does on Donna. 

-

“Must be hard,” Mike says, one day, sitting in her office and thumbing through paperwork, after Harvey’s left to take a call from Paula. 

“What must be hard?” she asks. 

“Trying to find the love of your life when they’re already right in front of you,” Mike says, without looking up. 

Donna pauses, and goes back to her paperwork, and doesn’t say anything.

She wonders what Mike sees that Harvey doesn’t, but she’s too scared to ask. 

-

Paula comes by the office, on their two month anniversary, and there’s something in the insignificant details of their conversation that makes Donna’s whole soul wrap around the kind of desperate panic people usually only feel when the person they have a crush on suddenly stops calling back. 

Paula knows about Carbone. 

Only Donna knows about Carbone, because it’s not fitting with Harvey’s persona to enjoy folding himself into bolt holes where the right people won’t see him, but he still goes at least once a month, with Donna, because she’s the only person who knows about Carbone. 

Paula knows, now, though. 

Paula probably also knows about how Harvey can’t knot his tie straight to save his life, because he broke two fingers on his left hand boxing a lifetime ago and they didn’t heal quite right. She probably knows he takes vanilla in his coffee. She probably knows he prefers blue suits but wears grey because he thinks it makes him look tougher. She probably knows he likes his bagels with cream cheese but not lox, that he’ll always pick a hot dog over pizza (but also that he still loves pizza), that he likes the shitty Thai place a lot more than he pretends to. Paula’s probably noticed the way he likes ink pens over ballpoint, because he likes the weight and heft of them. They’re easier to fidget with when he’s trying to make sense of a case. Paula probably knows Harvey wears a watch every day but checks the time on his phone and that he likes to eat burritos for breakfast, when he’s in the office, and pancakes or cereal for dinner, when he’s at home. She probably knows these things. 

She probably knows all the things that six months ago only Donna knew. 

It’s one thing for Harvey to push into all the spaces Donna is meant to be keeping for the people she dates. It’s entirely another thing for Paula to push into the spaces that Donna thought Harvey would always keep aside for her. 

She has a clear, distinct thought, in the gap between Paula leaving Harvey’s office and Rachel finding her to suggest drinks. 

_You are losing him._

It’s not a thought she should have, she understands, because God knows Harvey isn’t hers to begin with, and never really has been. He doesn’t belong to her anymore than she belongs to him. For all their conversations, for all the way they’ve had moments when they’ve both known, they’re it, they’re soulmates, and for all the secrets they hold together for each other, they are not each other’s, and they’ve said as much. 

But at the same time, Donna knows, he’s hers, in the simple light of day. He belongs to her like she belongs to him, like the sun belongs to the earth - never touching, because touching means destruction, but orbiting in eternity, finding the balance between heat and cool, night and day. There’s a delicate balance to gravity and orbits and they found it, once upon a time, and it had felt as eternal as anything could. It had been steadfast, or at least felt like it (they both lie about this), through Zoe and Scottie and Mark. Until change. Until Paula. 

So when Harvey calls in the evenings that Paula is working, to say hi, as friends, Donna finds herself asking questions - testing the orbit and the rotation of the way they hold each other in tension. 

Do you still only like your bagels with cream cheese. 

Do you still take vanilla in your coffee. 

Do you still have to get someone to straighten your ties, and that’s one she wished she hadn’t asked, afterwards, because he says yes but he’s been coming into the office with his tie straight and Donna wasn’t the one to do it. 

He hugs her, sometimes, and his skin feels like it has Paula’s fingerprints on it under her own. 

Where is this coming from, he asks once, when she asks if he’s had burritos for breakfast this week. 

She says, just checking. 

He says, I’m still me, Donna. 

She hangs up, because she doesn’t know what to say that’s honest, and she doesn’t think if she said anything she’d be able to disguise the way her breath rags when she thinks about him and how Paula knows all his corners and nooks. 

She calls back an hour later to apologise for hanging up, and he doesn’t answer. 

When he sees her the next day he says, sorry, Paula came over. 

Donna makes a joke so that she doesn’t cry, smiles her eyes shut to keep the tears from breaking through, and he’s never not called her back before, unless they were fighting. He’s always called back or text or sent a photo of himself rolling his eyes at some function. He always responds. 

Sorry, he says again. 

Donna thinks about the feeling of crushes not texting back, and thinks, 

_You are losing him_. 

She reminds herself he’s never been hers to find in the first place. 

-

  
  


“Didn’t you see that old boyfriend of yours? Mark? How is he?”

Donna thinks, married, but she doesn’t say it.

Harvey’s always hated cheaters. 

-

Donna kisses Harvey just after 9pm on a Tuesday and ruins everything. 

She knows, god, she _knows_ how squarely this sits on her shoulders. He’d been, he thinks at least, clear. He’d told her, this can’t happen, not anymore. He’s tried to push her back out of the doors he’s kept inviting her into over the years. He doesn’t seem able to connect the boundaries he draws in his mind and words with the way he tramples all over them with his phone calls and the way he still pauses and looks at her sometimes, but he’s tried. 

And even if he hadn’t, she knows. She knows the wounds he carries, only just now scarring over. She’s talked him through enough Thanksgivings and failed relationships to know exactly how turned around he is, still, over the things his mother’s done, and he’s made progress, but he’s not changed his mind. 

She knew all that, and she’d kissed him anyway, in some bizarre hope Harvey would turn out to be a leading man in a romantic movie and fall into bed with her, writing Paula out of the script without another thought. She doesn’t feel like she’s finally thrown a punch. She just feels guilty. 

As it turns out, Harvey is still just Harvey, confused and hiding and fucking _hating_ cheating.

But, she also thinks, fuck him, because he plays at lines and boundaries, says he’s going to make it work with someone else, and all the while he still needs her, still makes her responsible for his safety and his happiness, she’s still where Paula should be, and _that_ is on goddamn Harvey. 

And so, after he tears into her and leaves her standing, fuming and demeaned in the lobby, she takes five minutes before she goes to have a drink, and then she takes five minutes after she talks to Louis, and then five minutes at the taxi stand when she finally leaves for the night. 

And then, for five more, she stands outside his apartment door, not quite sure how she’d wound up there because she can’t remember giving the driver Harvey’s address, her knuckles working into her wrist, and tries to remember this is her fault and not his. 

She’s spends five minutes reminding herself that, however confusing and infuriating and fucking stupid he is, she still kissed him, knowing he’s with someone. He mixes signals, calling to say they can’t, and then staring at her at work like he can’t wait to tear her clothes off. He says it’s finished, and still calls to work through his feelings the way he would if she was his girlfriend. He blurs, redraws, muddies _everything_. 

But that’s Harvey, and she knows it, he’s done it for years, and so this is still on her. 

She breathes deep, not a sigh but close, not tears but they’re threatening, and turns to leave. 

“What are you doing here?”

He’s there, in the hallway, hands slack at his sides, and he’s somehow both hiding in his coat and nearly vibrating out of it. He’s got his head cocked to the side, jaw fixed, eyes clear and angry. 

“I don’t know,” she says. 

He shakes his head, the same shake he throws at Louis when he doesn’t want to deal with him. “Get out of here,” he says, and steps through her, angling his shoulder so that she has to pivot away from him to stop him jostling her on his way past. 

“Harvey -”

“ _No_.” He spins on her, and he’s twitching with anger. She tries vaguely to think of the last time she’s seen him this angry, and comes up blank. Maybe Stephen, but then he was angry for her and not at her, and this is wildly different. 

“No,” he says again. “I just left Paula’s. I told her. And I am not in the mood for this.”

“I wanted to apologise, Harvey -”

“Save it. I don’t want to hear it. You call me a friend, and you do this to me. I told you, our lines are clear. This stuff has _consequences_ , Donna. You of all people should know that.”

The arrogance and the dismissal is what does it, and she knows, still knows how much of this is on her, but watching him tease at innocence snaps her loose. She stares him down, feels her own spine pull up against her height, and there’s a defiant crackle that sparks into the air between them. “Oh, fuck you, Harvey,” she says. “How dare you. Coming at me with your hypocritical, condescending _bullshit_ and ignoring the fact you’re hardly fucking innocent in this.”

“Stop acting like a goddamn child.”

“Stop acting like your goddamn mother.” 

“Fuck you, I’ll never be like my mother. I’m no cheater.”

“Bullshit,” Donna says, stabbing her finger at the ground. “You’re already like her.”

“The fuck -”

She interrupts him, and she’s aware that this isn’t about Paula, not really. It’s about the last twelve years and the way he’s wandered blindly through it. It’s about the way he navigates through the dark by holding her hand, letting her show him everything but herself, and about the way he never quite looks up to see her for what and who she was. 

It’s about all of it. 

“There’s the part of me that you love, Harvey,” she says. “The me that has your back and helps you, supports you and explains you to yourself. That’s the me that you love.” he opens his mouth at that word and she cuts him off before he can speak. “Don’t fucking deny it. _Don’t_. And if that was all it was, if it was really just friendship, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” 

“I don’t -”

“But don’t pretend you don’t know what you’re doing when you call me. You know it’s not as a friend. You call me when you need that other side of me. The one you pretend you don’t want. You can pretend that’s not going on but we both know what it is and we know it when you call to fuck.”

Harvey’s chest is moving a lot faster than it should be. He’s out of breath, and she is too, and they both know why. “We aren’t fucking,” he says.

“Yes, we are. That’s exactly what’s going on. And sometimes it’s more than fucking, isn’t it? Sometimes it’s making love. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“We _talked_ about that.”

“No we didn’t. You _absolved_ yourself of that.”

He’s silent, and his jaw clenches against his teeth as he tries to think of something to say. He looks too much like a cornered animal, which makes sense, Donna supposes. She feels the same.

“That me on the phone? You’re _in_ love with that me. And you can’t figure out how to pull down the wall between those two versions of me, because you’re terrified of what might happen if you do. So you went and found someone who’s got both those sides and who you haven’t had to break up into pieces.”

She stops, because she needs oxygen and to catch her breath and she can feel her lungs pressing against her ribcage. She stares into the crackle and straight into him. She hasn’t done it in a while, because it scares them both, but she looks right into his soul, and he stares back, like he’s been caught in the biggest bluff of his life.

“Paula is me, Harvey,” she says. “The me where you don’t have to try.”

“What the fuck, Donna, I _am_ trying…”

“Bullshit. Flowers and apartment keys aren’t trying, Harvey. That’s all window dressing. It’s shit you’ve seen in movies. You’re not trying. You’re not showing her who you are. You’re with _Paula_ , Harvey, and you’re still calling _me_. At midnight. To talk about things you should be talking with her about. Be honest. If you were doing any of the things you do with me with anyone else, would you be thinking of them as your friend? Or as your girlfriend?”

He’s silent, because he’s caught. His body is suddenly still, caved, and he feels a lot shorter than he did a few minutes ago. 

“And you asked her to move in after I kissed you. Because you lied. I didn’t make you unfaithful, Harvey. You never have been. You still need this. You still need to call. And you know deep down that you shouldn’t. You know this is over the line. And you think if you move her into your house and your bed and make it so that she’s around, so that you can’t physically call me, then all the reasons that you _do_ call will just go away. But they won’t.”

He spreads his arms out helplessly. “Then what do you want me to do, Donna?”

“I want you to break up with me.”

Harvey drops his hands, and looks like he wants to fight her on the semantics, and then seems to realise there’s no point. “I don’t want to do that,” he says.

“You know what, Harvey? I don’t care. It’s not fair on me. And it’s not fair on her. If it’s her you want, she deserves all of you and not just the parts you’ve got lying around. _Stop_. Just … stop. Pick one of us. And it seems like you want Paula. So pick her, and move on, so I can too.”

She shakes her head, and finally, finally realises that what’s sitting underneath all the surface anger and indignation is just… exhaustion.

She can’t do it anymore. 

“Just let me go, Harvey,” she says, and it’s quiet when she does. “Let me go. If you’re really not in love with me, it shouldn’t be hard.”

He stares at her. He’s caught, and so is she, they both know it, and there’s nothing he can say that won’t make everything a thousand times worse. 

She leaves before he does, and she thinks about it long and hard overnight, and she apologises to him again on one hour’s sleep on the roof the next night. 

He says he wants to be alone and he stops calling. 

-

Mike says not to worry about having Harvey at the wedding, because he’s stressed and busy and already hefting the world on his shoulders, over in Chicago and trying to help Jessica and save the firm. Mike’s being selfless, Rachel says. 

Mike’s being a moron, Donna thinks, just like Harvey, because God forbid either of them admit they love each other. So Donna calls them both idiots under her breath, and calls Harvey anyway. She leaves a message even though she’s not expecting anything to come of it. Harvey and her have walls now, that aren’t because of Donna saying no and aren’t because of Harvey finding women who aren’t Donna. Instead, they’re because Donna is finding out that she and Harvey don’t look at loyalty quite the same way. 

Donna sees loyalty as process, as commitment, as a series of steps that have grace for people who stumble and lose the path every now and then. Or a lot, when it comes to certain people. 

Harvey thinks loyalty is a zero sum game. 

Donna spends too much time in between the letter Harvey rips up and the plane he gets on to Chicago thinking about how often he’d found himself in the weeds and she’d forgiven him anyway, and she thinks about how quickly the faith in her went out of his eyes when the tables turned. She thinks it was probably before she’d even got past her office door after she’d said I’m sorry and I just needed to know. 

She doesn’t regret confronting him. It had been a long time coming. Harvey still sees what he needs from her more than she sees her. He still expects more of her than he does of himself. It’s still not fair. He’s still him, infuriating and oblivious and blind. 

But she still misses him, like she has before when she tried to find boundaries. She misses him, and an honest part of her hopes maybe, still, but she doesn’t expect anything. 

Harvey isn’t someone she can expect anything of, anymore. 

So she leaves a message. 

And quite to her surprise, Harvey calls back. 

“Harvey, hey,” she says. “Did you get my message about Mike and R-”

“I’m sorry.”

“-achel, because … what?”

“I’m sorry,” he says again. He sounds awkward and embarrassed like he usually does when he apologises, because he doesn’t do it much, because he’s bad at it, and because he mostly only does it because he feels like he should and not because he feels like he’s wrong. But she hears something else under his words as well. 

Harvey sounds like he actually gets it. He sounds like regret and weariness all mixed together, and he actually sounds like he wants things to be different this time.

“You’re sorry,” she repeats. It’s a force of habit, repeating his own words back to him when she needs a moment to comprehend whatever he’s throwing at her. 

“Yeah.” He waits for her to speak, and then when it becomes obvious she’s not going to, he says, hesitantly, “I’ve had some time. To think. And how I’ve treated you? It’s not okay. I mean, it’s not okay that you kissed me. But I get it. I invited it. I had been inviting it. For a long time. I got us … here, just as much as you did. And I tried to punish you for it when I had an equal hand in it. I should have come to you and talked to you and tried to work this out. You deserved better.”

God, he’s actually explaining himself. 

“You didn’t know what you were doing,” she says, and she hates that she responds with such instant forgiveness. 

She always forgets her spine, when he talks with his heart. 

“I do.”

_That’s_ different. Donna isn’t sure how to deal with Harvey at the best of times. And she definitely isn’t sure how to deal with him when he’s apologising, and he’s not doing a terrible job of it, and he’s not even letting her make excuses for him. 

Her silence makes him nervous, and he says, “I mean, I did. Kind of. I thought Paula would help me… move on. I tried. I really did. It’s just that you’re…”

“There.”

“All the time. And I’ve tried to…” He casts about for words he can’t find, and sighs. “You were right. I was trying to replace you. I put you, both of you, in a no-win position. And then I blamed you for it.”

“I shouldn’t have kissed you.”

“I shouldn’t have let you leave. And I shouldn’t have yelled at you in the lobby. And I definitely shouldn’t have tried to get Stu to offer you a job. I owed you. Owe you. I owe you honesty at least, and I didn’t give you that, and I’m sorry.”

She smiles at that, because it’s teasing or tears, so she goes with teasing. “Harvey Specter,” she says. “Are you having a personal revelation?”

He laughs. “Well, Jessica moving on and Mike getting married will make you think about ... things.”

The way he says the last word makes her heart do embarrassing things it hasn’t done since high school, and how the fuck does he manage to do that, to slip past her boundaries and armour and into her lungs and heart with one word. “Things?” she says. 

“I… I want to get back. To how we were.”

She doesn’t know if he means jokes and light hearted banter or if he means kissing and talking, moaning and doing everything up to fucking and then backing away just at the last moment so they can pretend it doesn’t mean anything. 

Donna considers. “Friends?” she says. She knows, knows in that moment that there’s a discussion they should be having, again, about lines and conversations, touches and tongue on skin, but she’s also exhausted, and they’ve had that conversation a hundred times over and nothing’s changed. 

“Friends,” he says, and sounds like he knows what she’s thinking. 

“See you at the wedding?”

“Already on the way.” 

-

He kisses her after they dance at Mike and Rachel’s wedding, and they’re right back at the start again. 

They don’t talk that evening. There’s not much to say. Harvey is wrung out and thin with the news Mike’s dropped on him and the week that he’s had, and Donna’s still all eggshells and caution whenever they’re in the same room. 

So they don’t talk. Instead, she takes his hand, which feels like a lightning bolt after the last few weeks, and they dance until the songs run dry. They dance until Mike and Rachel leave, and they’ve both got rooms in the hotel, which suits Donna because she’s exhausted from pulling the whole evening together, and it suits Harvey because he’s just off the plane from Chicago and probably doesn’t even know where his keys are. 

He hovers near her after he says goodnight to Robert and as they collect their things from their table (Mike and Rachel had sat them together with knowing smiles and Donna vowed to give them both a telling off next time she spoke to them), occupying himself with his hands in and out of his pockets. He gets like this sometimes, when he’s out of his element or nervous and doesn’t see any particular reason to bluff his way through the evening. She acts vaguely impatient with him when he does, but only because it makes him smile. 

She’s never been able to avoid his smile. 

They both slum up to their floor on the lift, happy exhaustion wrinkling their clothes and smiles, with Harvey curled into the corner and giggling deliriously into his chest while Donna tells him how nervous Mike was that afternoon. Harvey gets into laughing fits when he’s exhausted. She likes that about him. 

And then, cautiously, into a gap between laughter, Donna says, “Mike said he spoke to you, after everything with Paula.”

Harvey takes a moment, then says, evenly, “did he.”

Donna nods as they hit their floor and the doors open, and Harvey raises his eyebrows, but decides not to take issue with it as she leaves before him, because she doesn’t think he’s thinking about Mike. Instead, he’s staring straight through her, and she can feel his gaze like the sun on the back of her neck. 

They leave the lift but not each other, because something’s happening, something familiar and terrifying, and God, Donna thinks, not again, how can he run from her and she frantically build walls, and then they share one lift up three flights and something shifts enough in that thirty seconds that they’re both rooted to the spot, staring at each other at the lift doors. Donna’s room is on the right. Harvey’s is on the left. 

Donna thinks, say something. There was a moment, when they were dancing. Say something. She knows it wasn’t just her. He’d leant his body into hers and it wasn’t the way friends dance. Say something. Because she’d felt the way his palm had flattened against the small of her back, not like he has in the past when they’ve danced, laughing and light, in his office. He pressed his palm against her like he needed her, like he wanted the purchase, like if nobody was around he would have hitched her against him and lifted her to settle their bodies together. Say something. He’d pressed his cheek to hers, his jaw, and she’d felt him breathing against her skin. Say something. He’d spun her out and then back in, and she caught his eye for a split second before he dropped his gaze, and she had known, known with clarity that he’d looked down because looking at her would have blown the world apart around them. Say something. 

She opens her mouth. 

“Good night,” Harvey says, just before the first syllable punches out of her, and she can’t tell if it’s a coincidence or it’s on purpose that he derails her. He nods, turns to leave, and Donna watches him go down the hallway. He doesn’t look back. Donna spends far too long thinking about if she should just follow him to his room, push inside the door and inside his skin. She tells herself, no. He’s till too soon from Paula, too near Donna, he’s still twelve years away. 

It’s a bad idea. 

She needs to take a couple of moments, standing in the silence of the hallway, before she can focus enough to look at the numbers on the doors around her and find her room. 

She’s just inside her door when the phone she has in her hand rings. 

It’s him, and she answers, “Harvey?” and tries to keep the hope and surprise out of her voice. 

“Mike’s a sneaky little rat,” he says.

“He is.”

“What else did he say?”

She’s silent, because she doesn’t want to say it, doesn’t want to speak out something that feels like taking sides or feelings like jealousy or revenge.

“Donna,” Harvey says, pressing gently. 

Fuck. “He said that you said Paula isn’t the one.”

“Yeah,” he says, and Donna finds herself holding a breath for a long, unreasonable second, before she reminds herself that if Harvey wanted her, really wanted her, then … the kiss would have been it. Surely, as stupid and ill-advised as it had been, the kiss would have been it.

He doesn’t elaborate, and she says finally, “I’m sorry, Harvey.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“No. Why?”

“I. Ah. Nothing.”

She hears his hesitation, but she’s searching for her purse at the same time, which she’s realising she didn’t have on the way up her room. “Shit,” she mutters. 

“What?”

“Forgot my clutch. I must have left it on the chair.”

As she says it, she pulls the door to head back down to the ballroom, stocking feet on the carpet, and she looks up as she does, and starts. 

Harvey.

He’s there, his phone to his ear, pressed up to where the door was, like something had rooted him to the spot. And he’s staring at her under hooded, dark eyes, and it punches her straight in the gut, that look, and she thinks, god.

He lifts his other hand, with her clutch, says, “you left this,” and then he’s dropping his phone and she’s dropping hers and every other time it’s been either him or her pressing in, but this time it’s mutual, and some invisible string yanks them together in the entrance of her hotel room. Her hands slip to cup his jaw in the same instant that his fall to her waist, and he pulls her against him like she’s weightless, and maybe she is, because it definitely feels like it. 

Harvey has his head tilted against hers, kissing her like he’s drunk even though they aren’t, his mouth loose over her lips, tongue slipping along hers in lengthy, messy presses, he’s kissing her like he’s not going to get another chance, and she’s dizzy, light-headed, and Jesus Christ, he’s fucking perfect, and she’s heartbroken that he’s been left by Mike and by Paula, because it’s made him threadbare, but she’s also in love with the raw thrum of his heart against her chest.

He doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, or maybe it’s that he can’t decide which part of her skin he wants to get to first. He skates his hands around the curve of her hips, thumbs pressing dangerously close towards her pubic bone, and then up over her torso, skimming her breasts to get to her clavicles. 

He grazes his thumbs over the curve of her shoulder, hooks the thin strap of her dress, and tugs it aside, following the goosebumps he’s drawing on her with his tongue. Donna’s got one hand in his hair and one hand pressed up into the doorframe, trying to find the balance between the sharpest clarity and utter loss, holding on to every scrape of his fingernail and every press of teeth on her skin even as and the leg-shaking oblivion of the way he makes her feel like oblivion. 

As soon as she can remember what day it is, she thinks, she’ll pull him inside her room, but for now it’s just him, just his body and his presence, and he could strip her naked and fuck her in the hallway and she wouldn’t even care. 

It’s when he suddenly slows that she feels most like air. There’s a moment where he’s trying to catch his breath and kiss into the skin at her shoulder all at once, one hand carding into the hair at her neck, his arm tense like he can’t decide if he wants to pull her flush against him or not. And then he slips his mouth up to hers, and his hand moves to her jaw, he pauses, and then it’s almost like he comes back to himself. He bumps his nose into the side of hers, opens his mouth against her lips, slowly, slowly, and in the gap before he presses his lips over hers, she feels his thumb along her cheekbone, and more than anything else they’ve done over the last decade plus, more than the other time and the texts, the calls, more than all that - 

\- his thumb against her cheek really, really feels like something. 

Of all things, it’s goddamn Louis that ruins it. 

She’s just wrapping her mouth around Harvey’s name, just about to say ‘come in’, when the elevator opens, and Louis steps out, and she can hear him on the phone around the corner, tearing strips off some first year in the bullpen. 

Harvey pulls his mouth from Donna’s neck, where he’s been sucking down firmly enough to make her stomach clench, and steps back hurriedly, bending to grab his phone and Donna’s as he does. He holds her phone to her and combs his hand through his hair at the same time he shifts his body, and he has this thing he can do where he blinks and changes how his shoulders sit and it suddenly looks like he hasn’t got a care in the world.

Donna knows better, but nobody else does. 

So as Louis turns the corner, he hasn’t interrupted Donna being pulled into Harvey’s orbit, flushed and pressed outside of herself. He sees two friends, shabby and tired after a long day, chatting through the wedding just before they both retire to separate rooms to bed. 

Louis asks how they are, and Harvey says, “fine, Louis,” after Louis takes a minute to explain to Harvey that whoever that intern in the bullpen is the single most useless first year associate in the history of law. 

Donna is trying to get her breath back and staring at Harvey and trying not to, and it would have been obvious if Louis didn’t know them so well that he was filling in how she looked from memory and wasn’t really paying attention. 

It’s probably a good thing that Harvey leaves before Louis. Donna watches him walk down the hallway, a hand in his pocket and the other flipping his phone back and forth in his hand, and thinks that if she didn’t know him any better, she’d think he was fine. 

Louis bids Donna goodnight, and as soon as Donna has the door shut she calls Harvey, and they talk, like nothing happened.

She can’t shake the feeling that they’re walking a fine line between heartbreaking perfection and a catastrophic mistake, and she remembers months ago, when he’d said, to trouble, and she thinks,

Yeah. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank yous, as always, are in order.
> 
> Thank you to Luisa, for the headcanon and discussions and explaining my own stories back to myself when I can't remember what I'm doing because I'm lost in the woods and because my memory is awful.
> 
> Thank you to Aditi, for the read-throughs and betas, the inspiration and the honesty.
> 
> Thanks to you, for reading, and thanks to those of you who have left a comment. It means the world.


	9. Season 8: Of ... Now?

Things have shifted. Finally. 

He’d once asked, and she’d once said no, because she doesn’t date people she works with, and she had genuinely thought after everything, it wouldn’t ever happen, and if it did, it would never work. All the sparks between them, all the looks, all the teasing and flirting and edging the line of professional and personal whenever they were in the same room or on the phone, it didn’t mean anything really. She’d learned that the hard way. From Stephen, and from him. 

And then, he’d pushed. Unexpectedly, he’d pushed, even though it was obvious in hindsight that it was always going to end this way, at the end of a long night of conversations she hadn’t expected to have and phone calls she hadn’t expected to miss, that he’d be at her door and she wouldn’t think _this is too much too soon_ or _how are we going to make this work_ but instead it was _just come in_ and _just_ _be here now_. She realises right there, with him unexpectedly at her doorstep, and with him saying _fuck it, be mine tonight_ , that there’s no such thing as timeline, no system, no need for professions of love or apologies or yet more goddamn conversations. 

Just him. 

Just him in the suit she loves but only told him she liked. 

Just him with his arms around her before they even get her front door shut. 

Just him, taller than she ever realised, stronger than she remembers when she’s touched him in the past, and has she ever had to press up on her calves quite this much to kiss him before? 

Just him in the cool dark of whatever the hour it was when they’d both taken a moment, before sleep, to look more than speak. 

Just him, finding a way to be straightforward that she was, for years, terrified to admit out loud she always hoped for, and then in the middle of that, he found a way to tell her he finally realised what he was missing, and it was her. 

When he finally leaves her, the morning after, dressed in the same clothes he’d shown up in, he says, tonight as well, with all the confidence of a man who knows he’s really found someone this time. And she smiles and bites her lip when he says he’ll call as soon as he can, and he does. 

“Hey,” he says, when he calls, and his voice is different to all the other times he’s called her before. Because something’s shifted. They’d said tonight, when they were both still not quite believing their luck, in her apartment that morning. And then like clockwork, tonight almost doesn’t happen, because of work, because work is always fucking there, it turns out, but there’s something in both of them that refuses to take no for an answer and they push back against it when they decide it’s not going to derail them. 

“Hey, she says, when he calls back again, later, to find out where and when. He’s not just assuming she’ll organise, pick a place she knows he’ll love, because something has shifted. It’s not Carbone’s and it’s not Del Posto, it’s a new place, and that’s different as well. Him trying feels like something else all together, something she hasn’t experienced for a long time, and it’s something she hadn’t even realised she was hoping and waiting for. 

Maybe, she thinks, maybe this is actually going to work. Maybe this is something. 

“You look good today. In that dress,” he says, after they’ve worked out the details. 

“You haven’t even seen me dressed today,” she says. 

“I know. Law of averages. You always look good,” he says, and she feels her smile press unbidden into the corners of her eyes. It feels good to smile freely, because the boy she likes is complimenting her.

“Careful, you, people are going to think you’re soft,” she says, and can’t quite keep the push out of her voice, the one that sounds less like teasing and more like yearning. 

“I’ll take my chances,” he says. 

“Soft looks good on you,” she murmurs. 

She can almost hear him smile down the line. “See you tonight?” he says.

“See you tonight.”

“Bye, Donna.”

“Bye, Thomas.”

-

They’re spending just about every night together, and even so, he calls during the day. He doesn’t call with sideways comments and strained pauses or with hushed, illicit whispers. Instead, he calls to ask about dinner, about what time she’ll be free, and he tells her he’s looking forward to seeing her, that she’s beautiful, that he misses her. 

It’s different, because it’s allowed, and she loves that it’s allowed. 

She tells Rachel that. 

“So, he openly admitted to you he was attracted to you, and told you that he wanted to take you out, and then he set a time and place, and then he showed up?” Rachel had asked, one lunch break when she’d called Donna to check in. 

“He did.”

“Huh,” Rachel said, and there was just enough to the word even though she was trying to be neutral with it that Donna said, “what?”

“Nothing.”

“Rachel.”

“Well… what about Harvey?”

“... what  _ about _ Harvey?” Donna’s trying not to be defensive and she can hear the failure in the clip in her tone, the one she almost never uses on Rachel. Rachel’s not the first person to squeal excitement at Donna’s news that she’s seeing someone, only to then fall off the edge of her joy when Donna doesn’t say Harvey’s name. Donna is tired of the polite, hidden disappointment that keeps following up the word ‘Thomas’ and she’s also starting to feel like people think she’s doing something wrong, and she hates that. 

She’s a grown woman, making a grown decision, and she won’t be made to feel guilty for moving on from Harvey. Harvey will ever be a wistful could-have-been-but-never-was. They could have been, really could have been something. But she’s learned that her path is what it is and his is what it is, and the occasional pang of ‘maybe’ isn’t worth a hundred years of pain. They just never got the timing right, and it is what it will ever be.

But Thomas - Thomas. 

Thomas and her, she thinks, really could have it all, and Donna loves the feeling of falling for someone she’s allowed to fall for. 

“I just..” Rachel sounds like she’s searching for the right words. “It’s a lot different to how things have always been with Harvey.”

“Thomas is the opposite.”

“ _ Yeah _ .”

“Thank God,” Donna says with a laugh, and she doesn’t even wonder if she means it. 

She keeps missing Harvey’s calls. 

  
  


-

Scottie calls her that evening and says she hopes one day that Harvey will see what everyone sees, and Donna can’t figure out if she agrees with her or not. 

Harvey talks to her at the elevators, it feels like he corners her, or maybe he’s cornered himself, and she can see something in him she doesn’t think she’s seen before - not courage, exactly, but she can’t put her finger on precisely what it is until she’s staring at him in a way that she distantly thinks is far too obvious for how happy she is with Thomas, and then, like she’s conjured him out of thin air with the thought of his name, Thomas arrives with an easy, straightforward innocence that makes Harvey’s shaking hands seem out of place.

Donna realises that the shaking is fear.

Harvey is terrified, and if she didn’t know any better, she’d guess maybe he’s realised that Thomas is making space for himself inside her where there never used to be room for anyone else. 

He looks away as the elevator doors shut and she sees his shoulders shift uncomfortably, and she gets the overwhelming sense that he has had the sudden realisation of time passing, and along with it the revelation that nothing ever stays forever. Not even Donna. Not even if she wants to, an eternity ago when she wanted to. Not even if she had once felt like she’d die if she had to.

He looks so fragile in the second where the doors slide shut that something shatters in her as well. Donna edges her way gingerly through dinner and doesn’t go back to his place after, doesn’t invite him back to hers. She says she’s tired and he believed her because he’s not nursing a decade of covert looks and he’d never shove her up against his office wall at 2am after everyone had gone home. He’d just tell her she’s beautiful and he’d like to be with her. 

Donna gets home to the kind of unlit dim in her apartment that still springs forth memories of corridor kisses, of texts starting  _ are you alone  _ and of her own gasp echoing, and she tries so hard not to remember that she draws them in ever more vivid lines even though they don’t ache as much as they used to. She picks her phone up and massages it in her hand for a long while.

She pauses for a long time at  _ H _ , her finger hovering, before she scrolls on to  _ T _ . 

She wants to call him and corner him, ask him about that panic sitting behind his eyes and what it meant. But she knows it’s only one of two answers, and either one would ruin her.

She calls Thomas, and he’s just getting home. He jokes about the waiter who’d spilled their water and calls her beautiful and part of Donna hates how much she loves how easy it is with him. How had she thought for so long that sleepless nights and uncertainty was just part of adult relationships?

“Are you okay?” Thomas asks. “You seemed distracted tonight.” He’s not second guessing himself or her, not trying to dig out hidden meaning, not reading into any lines. She was distracted, and he’s asking her why, and he wants to help. 

Donna’s thinking about Harvey, but in the same breath she’s also thinking something else. That, genuinely, Thomas might be it. 

“I.. ah. Yeah, I’m fine. Work is just a lot at the moment,” she says. 

“Well, you know if you need to take a sick day, I can come over right now, and I’m sure we can make sure you don’t get enough sleep so that you definitely need to take tomorrow to rest.”

Donna smiles into her phone in a way she thought she’d never be able to without feeling the bittersweet pull of secrecy and silence. “I think it might be a bit transparent if I call to take a personal day and they can hear you making coffee in the kitchen.”

“I’ll bring chicken soup,” he says without missing a beat. “Nobody can argue with chicken soup. Especially not my grandmother’s recipe.” 

“You always have your grandmother’s secret chicken soup ready to go in case your girlfriend needs to play hooky?”

“Of course. Always be ready with an alibi. That’s the other thing my grandmother taught me. You never know when you’re going to need to beat the flu and you never know when you’re going to have to ditch the cops.” 

Donna laughs, and he talks with her into the night. 

Thomas soothes things, with the whole way of how he is, and by the time she goes to bed, she’s smiling, and she’s forgotten that six months ago she would have hated that too. Because that’s what she saw in Harvey while the doors were closing - not fear he was losing her or that she’s done, but fear she’s just … forgetting him. 

Forgetting him is far, far worse than hating him.

Donna falls asleep with Thomas on her mind and lips.

  
  


-

That look at the elevators keeps popping up. 

She’d woken up in Thomas’ bed, his hand splayed out over the curve of her hip. He has strong, large hands, and even though he’s not a cuddler, he’s also never far from reach or from light touch. He’s got an instinct for Donna, balances the way she loves touch with the way he likes to stretch out. He takes up space but he also makes space. He has a way of shifting when she wakes, onto his back, opening his arm and chest out to her to fold herself into, and he busies himself for long moments playing with her hair. Donna loves it when he does that. 

There’s only one other person that likes her hair more than Thomas does. 

It’s a problem, Harvey edging back in. That goddamn look, at the elevators, had fucked it all up. Other people had looked at her the same, finding out about Thomas. Louis, and Samantha, Rachel, when she’d FaceTimed her after that first night. The look that said ‘you’re moving on’. And they’d all looked crestfallen, because they realised she was serious about it this time. They could see it, knew it, and Donna knew it too. 

Or, in the dark of the evening and away from the distraction of the day, knowing that she’s only trying to move on. The actual moving on is slower, and getting a lot harder than she’d thought. 

The last part is something she never says out loud. Harvey’s always felt like a phantom pain, like a limb that’s not there anymore, making itself known through sting and tears. 

Maybe that’s how everyone feels. They aren’t unhappy that Donna’s with someone. They’re not even unhappy about Thomas - Thomas is universally liked and respected through the firm. He and Donna are a great match, everyone agrees. 

They just don’t know how to be happy for her and reconcile the aching bittersweet on her behalf at the same time. 

Donna knows how they feel, because Thomas has almost done it. 

He’s almost found his way in, properly. Donna wanted him to, invited him in, to her heart and her soul and her life. He fits in well - so well that late night calls with Harvey on the other end of the line, joking and talking and, later, fucking, all fall by the wayside. She’s not cutting him out, not deliberately, it’s just… Thomas is there now, instead.

She isn’t sure but the fact she keeps missing Harvey’s calls because she’s on the phone with Thomas feels like it means something. Some days she doesn’t even think about Harvey, once she leaves the office.

  
  


She doesn’t call Harvey back, when she misses his calls. He never asks why.

And then, that look, and that look coming from Harvey feels much more significant than it does coming from Louis or Rachel or Samantha. 

That look brings back memories of him, feelings of phantom limbs, and worst of all, doubt. 

It feels like Thomas is starting to find the spaces that she’s been keeping for Harvey. 

Or maybe she’s trying to make him fit into them. 

Thomas stirs, next to her, cracks an eye, and says good morning. He shifts, stretching and lazy, onto his back, throws his arm across the pillows, opens his chest up to her. He’s got mussed hair, but his beard doesn’t grow as quickly and wildly as Harvey’s does, so his chin still feels smooth to the touch when she shuffles into his orbit and stretches an arm across his torso. Thomas knocks his hand, sleep drunk, into her hair, somewhere between tangling and tickling. 

“Hey,” he says, and Donna remembers how well he fits, and how Harvey refuses to. 

“Hey,” she says back, and smiles into his chest.

-

There’s a knock at the door, and it must be Thomas. He said they should talk more. He’d left after she’d admitted to him that Harvey was always wherever she was. He’s ever straightforward and deserving of the same, so she told him, but she’s still not used to it and it felt like something shaking, unhooking, loose and dull inside of her when she’d finally admitted it, finally admitted that Harvey’s just … there. Because he is, he’s in all the spaces where Thomas should fit, where she wants Thomas to fit, where she’s tried to make him fit. She wants Thomas to be the person who fits inside her soul, but she finds, out loud and only as she’s saying it to him, that he doesn’t. Because Harvey is already there. 

I can’t cut him out, she’d said. It’s the first time she’d said it, out loud, to anyone, ever. She’s never said it - to Rachel, to Mike, to her mom, nobody, and she thinks about how it’s Thomas that she said it to, and that means that Thomas must mean  _ something _ . And he does. He really does. 

There’s a feeling that she can’t name; that feeling of wanting so desperately for Thomas to take up space in her even as she knows he can’t because it’s Harvey shaped, and, it turns out, she can’t remake her needs, the things her soul keens for, into different shapes, even if she wants to. Not even though she needs to. 

She needs to because she realises nobody else will ever fit the way Harvey does in the same moment that she realises he’s never going to have the courage to fill it, because if he was going to, if he was ever going to, the elevator was it. Surely, the elevator was it. Because Harvey isn’t afraid. If he wanted her, really wanted her, then Thomas would have been just another wall to break down, and he would have said something. 

Scottie said something to him, Donna knew. Scottie had said something to her, and Harvey knew, so there’s no way Scottie hadn’t said something to him. She’d said, why can’t you see it, or she’d said, you need to pull your head out of your ass, or she’d said, do it now or you’re going to lose her, but whatever it was, she’d said something. 

Harvey hadn’t, though. He’s not one to back away, even if it meant a confrontation, even if it meant saying something,  _ anything _ , in front of Thomas. And he hadn’t. And that, she knew, was it. He’s trapped her. 

He’s trapped her with the way he is, his looks and his glances, his breath and the way his heart feels when she’s felt his pulse, steady rhythms but somehow unique. He’s trapped her with his gaze and gait, the way he walks and the way he takes up space in the room and in her soul. He’s cornered her with his touch, before, but it’s more than that, because way before she’d ever had to clarify she doesn’t date people she worked with he’d cornered her with his soul and all the brightness in it he tries to hide but lets her dig out (just her). He’s trapped her with all his jealousy and lust, all his light and the way he throws himself into the storm for her, all the bad in him as well as the good, she needs it all. She’s done, she knows, for anyone else. She thinks she could have loved Thomas - genuinely and deeply, and they were the perfect people at the perfect time. It’s just that it wasn’t until she admitted Harvey would never be on the same page or in the right place at the right time, and that it didn’t matter, that she knew it couldn’t be Thomas, even though she wished. 

Harvey’s always there, and soulmates don’t do timing. 

But he doesn’t want her. 

He called, after the hearing, and she didn’t answer. She realises that she hasn’t been missing his calls. She’s been avoiding them, because every time she answers the phone to him he takes a bit more of her shape for his space, and if she doesn’t stop, there’ll never be any way someone who actually wants her could find a corner. 

Maybe Thomas could have a corner. 

She’s thinking about how Thomas could have a corner when Thomas knocks. 

She thinks about what to say, and how to say it, while she crosses her living room and her entrance. She thinks about how to say she wants him to fit and she thinks about how to say she’s terrified he won’t. She thinks about how to ask him to give her time to remake all the Harvey shapes into Thomas shapes, and she thinks about how to tell him even if he gives her time for that she doesn’t know if it’ll work. She isn’t sure how to say it all, but she knows she has to. 

The problem is that all the things she wants to say to Thomas die in her throat when she answers the door. 

Because it’s Harvey. 

He looks at her, and he looks like he wants to blink but is terrified that he’ll wake up if he does. He’s looking at her like nothing else she’s ever seen, he’s looking at her like he’s seeing her for the first time, and like he’s realised that she’s it, and she’s in all his spaces too. 

But she’s hoped before and she’s seen him look at her in just a certain way so many times. She’s seen him bump into coincidence and use it to kiss her, in the dark up against door frames and office walls, and then act like it never was. She’s watched him realise something deep about her, about them, and then back away from it in the same breath. She’d seen him fit himself into the spaces inside her and then slip out of them again. 

She can’t do it again. Every time she’d thought, maybe, he ran, and every time she’d dared to let her heart hope, he’d turned back, shied out. Her mind and her heart don’t have it, can’t go through it again. And so, it’s not her brain that hopes this time, not even her heart. They’re done.

But her soul takes three steps back. 

And he meets her. 

He kisses her, not like he’s ever kissed her before. There’s a  _ now _ and an  _ always _ in his kiss that she hasn’t tasted before. It cracks through her body like a sudden unexpected moment, like waking up from nowhere to sudden daylight, but she doesn’t have time to think about it, only grab onto it and hold on, slip her hands around him, let him shift and push and press her back into her apartment. 

There’s a strength in his arms unlike anything she’s felt from him when he lifts her against the side table like it’s nothing. He’s held her against walls and counters, he’s told her darkly about how he wants to strip her naked in his office, push her up against his desk, but this feels like fate itself in his touch, not so much effort as inevitability. Something else is pulling them together, has been for fifteen years, and they’ve just finally, finally, stopped pretending. 

She always thought that if this moment happened it would feel like the heavens shifting, but it just feels like relief and home. 

He’s everywhere, kissing or not kissing, just pressing skin against hers, and she can feel the shaking disbelief under the certainty in his hands and in the way his fingers find her back, her sides, her breasts. He’s pressing his mouth against every inch of bare skin he can find, and he feels like floodgates collapsing in on themselves. Every other time something like this has happened, it’s felt dark and illicit. It’s felt like oblivion, like throwing reality away, like  _ fuck it _ . This, shifted, feels like letting reality in, like truth, like  _ fucking finally _ . She thinks if he wasn’t crowding out every other thought she might land on an appropriate metaphor, but it’s only that, only the one thought, only  _ thank god, finally.  _

He doesn’t say anything, not a word, and neither does she, because there’s nothing to say and anyway they’ve been doing almost nothing but talk for a decade and nothing has come of it, nothing that they really wanted for each other and from each other, and it’s only now in the silence that he’s finally found his way to her. 

Her hands take over because her brain isn’t working properly, Harvey’s short-circuited it with his taste and the weight of his legs against hers and the way he’s there and has heft and is real. She can’t coherently form more than the thought,  _ Harvey,  _ but her hands hold all the memories and hope and want of 15 years and they press through his hair and over his skin like she’s planned this moment down to every breath. They circle his jaw so she can kiss him back, nudge her lips over his mouth, over his hollow breath, over his ear. 

He hooks his hands around her waist and cinches himself against her, and Donna’s hands lock down instinctively as he does, and she just holds on as the feel of  _ him  _ punches through her _ , _ settling against her and finding his way into all the spaces she’d kept aside for him, and she thinks she might fall backwards into an orgasm just by the way he’s trapped his hips against hers. 

He threads his fingers through hers, eyes locked, and she thinks she looks in love, and probably much more in control of herself and of this situation than she feels, but Harvey … Harvey is looking at her like he almost can’t comprehend it, the feeling of all the things that he’d never let himself dare to hope for unfolding all at once in front of him like it must have been when god first watched the universe spark into breath. He looks in awe and like he’s just woken up and also utterly terrified that maybe it’s a dream and when he really does snap awake it’ll be on his own with the soft dim of the screen of his phone sitting between them again. 

She draws him into the bedroom, because he looks too stunned to move, and they’re taking turns to take charge as they swing in and out of disbelief, Donna finding him under her fingers as he stares at her dumbly, like she’s sunrise, like she’s oxygen. 

“Donna,” he says, finally, and it’s the first thing across his vocal chords that isn’t pure need.

It’s almost a question, and she says, “I’m here,” squeezes the butt of his thumb between her fingers, pressing to show she’s real, and convince herself he is too, and they’re really not going to panic, to be interrupted, to lie, to run. 

“Yeah,” he says, a half-surprised breath, and then his mouth is on hers again, his hands on her waist, her hands at the knot in his tie, and there’s been fantasies buried in her where it’s him taking his tie off and cinching her wrists together but that isn’t tonight, and it’s just loose when she backs into the foot of her bed, and Harvey keeps on until she’s laid back heavy against her mattress and he’s walking his weight over her on braced elbows. 

He settles. 

They’ve been here before, a hundred lifetimes and twice as many years ago, and it shouldn’t be this that feels like the ground shifting under her. He’s been over her before, his weight pressing, and more - cock slicked inside her, naked and tacky from sugar and cream, with his infuriating smile and that look in his eyes like he knows something nobody else in the world does, pressed up on his arms so he can hitch his hips a little more deeply into her. She knows what it is to have his weight on her, shunting her into her own mattress, his body finding all the spaces where he fits against her, and so this should feel familiar more than anything else, but it doesn’t. It feels like the first time she’s been here with him, and maybe ever, and her hand goes from the button at the collar of his shirt to the back of his head, so she can feel him and remind herself it’s real. 

He cups her jaw in both hands, eyes on hers, and opens his mouth a few times, trying to pick words, and she doesn’t know if it’s the words themselves or the fact they’re here in this too-much moment, but he can’t find them. He huffs his frustration at himself, and instead, he kisses her, and she thinks, I know exactly what you mean. 

It’s the kiss that slows things down, and Harvey seems to remember there’s time, there’s time now. He pushes his bottom lip between hers, pauses to give her a moment to press her tongue against him, tug lightly, and he sucks down and takes a long minute to just kiss, just taste, just be, just tickle the edges of his fingertips along her hairline. 

She touches his cheek, feels the evening rough of his light stubble, and she loves all of him. 

Harvey’s thumb slips under her silk strap, guides it over her shoulder and he follows it with his teeth along her collar bone. He presses his hand down her side, fingertips scratching lightly over silk on the way down and then skin when he slips it up back under her shirt, tickling goosebumps in his wake. 

There’s a tense kind of patience in his touch, and it’s also under her palms as she pushes her hands over his hips, catches his shirt, pulls it out of the waistband of his pants. She just wants to get her hands to his skin, in the same way he needs his on her, and it’s the first time she’s felt the supple warmth at the base of his hips since he’d shown up at the same door years ago. Then it had been oblivion and fun and losing the night in each other. This is ages past, and gravity. 

He finds the hem of her shirt at the same time that she gets his free, just enough buttons at his collar loose, and he slips her top off at the same time she pulls his over his head. He presses a long breath out from his lungs as he seats his belly against hers, looks almost awed as he slips his hand up and over her breast, watching her turn her head into the crook of her arm to take a moment to gather herself, because she can feel any semblance of control she had rapidly flicking out, and Harvey looks the same. 

He presses his mouth into her neck, where she’s opened it up to him, and she huffs a shallow moan into her elbow ditch when his tongue finds that exact pressure point just where her jaw starts to curve against his chin. His teeth scrape, accidentally, then experimentally, and then with more confidence when Donna’s breath sits up high in her lungs in response. He circles his palm over her breast, pressing lightly, then finding a rhythm with his thumb that’s somewhere between art and chaos. Donna instinctively arches her back against his hand, her belly pressing up more firmly against his, enough of a hitch to catch his lungs, and he has to stop for a moment because they’re both way, way too overstimulated by the pressing reality of it all. He pushes up on his spare hand to relieve some of the friction of his legs over hers. Donna hitches a knee up for purchase, pushes against him, and Harvey breathes,  _ jesus _ , in the same moment that he drops his forehead to her sternum. He takes a moment before, almost unconscious of it, he turns his head a little so he can open his mouth over her breast, teeth and tongue against her nipple, nudging it tight. Donna pulls her hands over his back, nails catching into the dip of his spine, and she lifts her head to kiss into his forehead and breathe low into his skin. 

It’s almost clumsy, the way they’re hanging onto each other like gravity might spin them apart at any moment. Distantly, she loves the artlessness of it all - it’s not an absence of skill as much as it is a relentless instinct that overrides anything else. Every touch cracks against her skin, and when he closes his mouth over her properly to suck her nipple against the rough of his teeth, a low moan punches automatically out from her soul and her hips kick up involuntarily. 

There’s an artlessness to the way Harvey gets his hand between them and pops the button on his pants, just to relieve pressure more than anything she thinks, because a second after that he has his hand down her waist band, catching it with his wrist and nudging it low on her hips, and then Donna lifts her hips so he can slide them and her underwear off. He lets his hips fall against hers, and there’s something wanton and thrilling in the feel of her bare skin hitting air and the rough of his pants. She hitches against him, seeking pressure and friction. He hisses when she does, she can feel the shake in his arms, and he’s trying so hard to hang onto control. 

He shunts his hips back from hers, slicks his hand between them instead, taking a moment to undo his fly before slipping the tip of his thumb between her folds, slicking them in her wet and then over her clit, finding a slow rhythm that’s as maddening as it is satisfying. 

He sits up over her as she presses up towards his hand, shuffling his hips forward, and he’s close enough that her reaching hands fall at his pants, and Donna pushes them over and down his hips, freeing his cock. She takes him in hand, strokes him slowly and firmly, thumbing over his head and the taut ridge on the underside, until his own thumb falters. He takes a moment to breathe heavy into his stomach and then pauses to pull his pants and boxers off and toss them aside, but he’s probably just gathering himself. 

They’re walking a tense line of tentativeness and passion, because Donna doesn’t think she’s going to be able to last long at all given the way Harvey, with just his thumb back on her and the flutter he’s shunting into her torso with his light press from his other hand, is kicking her body into the instinctive feeling of  _ nearly _ .

She’s just on the verge of saying, “Harvey,  _ please _ ,” when he reaches between them to guide the head of his cock between her folds, and then slowly and firmly sinks into her. He hikes her leg up so he can press in deep, nudging right up into her back wall. He buries his face into the side of her neck as he does, gasping, “god,” and then sounds like he’s trying to say her name but can’t get his brain to focus enough. 

There’s a moment, where time and night stops, where Donna feels the sharp relief of  _ him _ , of him inside her, of countless calls, texts, of hidden looks and outright staring, of snatched kisses and held hands, all converging, all leading here though they’d never have known it and definitely never would have admitted it. 

He kisses, slow, into her cheek, his fingers splaying across her bent knee, and just the feeling of him shifting his hips to settle properly feels like waking up. 

There’s a moment, and then he’s leaning his forehead against hers, not moving, thumb stroking lightly over the edge of her face, and he’s not even kissing, he’s just breathing, and breathing her in, and she thinks that maybe he feels like she does, that there’s spaces inside her that are only made for him, and now he’s here and fitting them, and that’s it what he’s longed for. Not sex, not fucking, not even making love.

Harvey just needed to find where he fits, and so did Donna, and now that they’ve collided, it’s more than they could have dared whisper in hope. They’re not talking, but she swears he’s thinking it like she is.

He kisses her then, maybe so he doesn’t cry, and shifts his hips, drawing back and then pushing in again, and the stretch around him is slow, and it’s glorious. 

There’s a thread of tension that’s always underpinned them both, and how they are, and it’s only a minute before the slow, long push gives way to something more urgent, Harvey holding her gaze, his arms braced either side while she pushes hands and fingers along the curves of his hips, over his back, up his arms, thrilling the feel of muscle, his weight and warmth and reality.

He shifts until he finds the right angle, until his pubic bone nudges just right with every thrust, until she’s punching air out of his lungs in time with him, until she has to turn her head to the side to find oxygen, and then loses it anyway when he takes the opportunity to lean his head down and nudge his nose along her temple. 

She remembers, in the haze, all the times they’ve looked at eachother or stolen hidden touches, or the times he’s kissed her or she’s kissed him, the time he pushed her roughly into orgasm against the glass of his office and she’d leant the bridge of her nose against the side of his head, almost domestic, and she thinks, 

Harvey.

She turns her head back to him, to kiss him or at least try, her mouth open and loose against hers. She kicks her hips up against his, finding his rhythm and matching it with hers, pushing her knees up to angle her hips so he can sink in deeper and then pushing to nudge her walls against him. He leans on one hand so he can palm over her breast and she moans against his lips, holding on across his shoulders, her stomach coiling, muscles twitching. 

At some point, he drags fingers down her body, over her stomach, and the rough of his thumb finds her clit, and he presses down just right, pulling a gasp from Donna’s lips and a rush of wet past his cock, and she’s pretty sure it’s been maybe ten minutes since he cracked his knuckles against his door, which is a record, but it’s completely overwhelming, she’s completely overwhelmed and so is he, and he strangles her name past his throat as he tries to hold off his own orgasm, but he can’t which doesn’t matter, because she throws herself after him a moment later anyway. 

-

  
  
  
  


They’re trying to talk. 

He’s slowed down, somewhere in the middle of round … something, and she has no idea what time it is but it’s still inky blackness hiding them from the world, both late and early enough that there isn’t a hint of daylight starting to steal through her bedroom window. 

Harvey’s always had a way of making time stand still and shift around him. 

He’s settled beside her, lying on his stomach with his arm slack over her stomach, leaning his jaw on his crooked hand, somewhere between recovering from the last time he shattered apart and hitching his hips against her to press inside again. He’s spent long moments running the backs of his fingers over her skin like it’s meditation, pausing to thumb over freckles, over hip bones, over places where her skin is taut and places where she’s just not twenty anymore, and he seems fascinated by all of it.

He’s started several times, saying “Donna,” and then losing his courage, or his train of thought, or both. She’s waiting, waiting him out, her palms pressing through the hair at his temple and around the back of his neck. She’s said everything, they both know, she’d laid herself bare in conversations and stolen kisses, and they both know it’s his turn. Harvey, who ran, who hid, who pressed in and pulled back, and who appeared out of the blue and out of nowhere - it’s his turn.

But he’s still struggling. 

“You weren’t…” he starts, before trailing off, shaking his head, muttering, “goddammit,” to himself. 

Donna, running her hand lightly over his torso, can feel his heart hammering against his chest, and he’s caught his breath back so it’s not that, and he looks in love and certain and also somehow completely terrified. 

And so, Donna slips her hand to her side table, palms her phone where she’d left it at Harvey’s knock several hours ago, and arches an eyebrow at his slack confusion while she pulls a number and hits the call button. 

On the floor next to them, Harvey’s phone hums in the pocket of his pants. Harvey rolls away from her, leans his arm over the bed, fishes it out, and smiles self consciously when he brings it to his ear and Donna tickles the hair at his other temple.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” she says, smiling up into his eyes. 

“So.”

“So.”

“It happened.”

“It did.”

“Finally.”

“Finally.”

He sighs then, and says, “I’m terrified.” It feels like the first honest thing he’s said to her in months. Maybe it’s the first honest thing he’s said to her since Paula. 

“Me too.” She finds his hand in the dark. 

“But ...I feel like I shouldn’t be scared.” He’s frustrated, like he doesn’t know why he feels anything but bliss. 

“Harvey.” She drifts a hand along the side of his face, tilts her head to the side. He’s ragged and worn through but he also feels fresh, feels different, feels… complete, somehow. “This is big. This is a big thing that’s happening.”

“Yeah.”

“I need you to know. This isn’t like before. This isn’t getting champagne drunk and kissing in some alley and it’s not phone calls we’re going to pretend don’t happen. This is real.” He nods, and she has to take a second to keep the shake out of her voice. “It’s a lot. And it’s scary. But that’s okay. This is worth being scared.”

“Is that why you weren’t there? At the trial. I looked around. And… you weren’t there.” He doesn’t say  _ I needed you _ , but it’s in his eyes. 

“I know. I was confused. I was hurt. I thought you were going to say something. At the elevator.”

“I wanted to. You have no idea. I fucked that up.”

“You could have called me to talk about it.”

“You might not have answered. You’ve been...” He shrugs his shoulders and she can see him deciding not to say the word, whatever it would have been. Distant, maybe. Reserved. Whatever the word would be that he’d pick for her trying to fit Thomas in where he was meant to be. There’s no blame in his shrug, because he knows that it’s just as much him, but it’s still there. 

She takes a moment, because he’s right and it hurts that he’s right. It hurts that she pulled away, and it hurts that she had to. “I’m here now.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry I tried to cut you out.” She knows she doesn’t need to apologise, and it isn’t one. It’s just sorrow. Real sorrow, not for Thomas, not for unsaid words in elevator lobbies, not for Paula or missed calls or even right back to  _ let’s put it out of our minds and never speak of it again _ \- but for the way it’s all rolled together and stolen years from them. Moments. Years. All the individual times they didn’t talk, didn’t admit it, didn’t get the hell out of their own way, it’s all moments that built empires. Seconds of fear that drew them both in decades of shadow It’s grief and loss and nothing to do with blame. 

“I’m sorry,” she says again. “I didn’t want to,” she says, and it’s inadequate but she hopes it’s enough, and she doesn’t manage to stop her voice from cracking. 

“I’m sorry I made you think you had to,” he says, with a clarity she hasn’t heard from him in a while, and his voice cracks too. 

There’s a long moment, and they’re both caught in between  _ thank god finally _ and  _ why so long _ and it’s threatening tears for her, and maybe him as well. Tonight won’t solve everything, she knows. Not even close. But it feels like they could actually do it, now.

Finally, she blows a watery sigh between her cheeks, and says, “this is a lot more depressing than I thought this night would be.”

It breaks the heaviness around them, and Harvey laughs lightly, settling back on his side, pillowing his head on his elbow. He crooks an eyebrow at her in the moonlight. “You thought about this night huh?” he says.

Goddamn cheek, always near the surface. 

She loves that about him.

“Only most days,” she says, and she shifts as well, onto her front. Harvey’s hand automatically finds her back, tickling his fingers along the dip where her spine curves along her back. 

“Me too,” he says. 

“Please, thinking about how you want to be with me and thinking about how great my ass looks are not the same thing.”

“They’re not?” he asks innocently, drifting his hand down to cup her butt. 

She laughs, and drops her phone in the same moment he does, and he slips over her, his chest against her back, kissing into her shoulder, sliding a hand under her to explore and hitch her butt against his hips, and it’s only a moment before they bypass the need to talk anyway. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god you guys FINALLY. 
> 
> Anyway if you want to leave a message, that would be lovely, this is exhausting, I can't with these two idiots.


	10. Season 9: Of Ever

“Hey,” he says.

She’s mostly asleep, sprawled on her stomach across the mattress, cradling a pillow against the side of her face, rag dolled and pleasantly sore from however many hours she and Harvey had spent climbing over and into each other the night before. She’s had three hours sleep, maybe, four max, and she could easily slip into total oblivion for the whole morning and not even think twice about it. 

So when he says it, just for a second, she thinks they’ve fallen asleep by accident and left their phones on the hook overnight like they used to, years ago, before Liberty Rail, before Paula, before Thomas. He’d wake up, or she would, and their sleep-riddled ‘hey’ down the phone line would stir the other. They’d both say, see you at the firm later, or talk about the morning while she made coffee and he stretched and complained and got out of bed at the last possible second, and then they’d get to the office at about the same time. Donna would hand Harvey a bagel, and he’d hand her a sugar hit disguised as a coffee, and they would both pretend that this particular morning routine was normal and just something secretaries and bosses did on occasion.

This time though, the ‘hey’ is rumbled in her ear, and followed by the slow press of lips against that nook of skin just where her earlobe and neck meet. 

He’d discovered last night that she really, really likes it when he kisses her there, or presses his teeth or tongue down along it. 

She’d told him once, handsets between them in the dark, that she’s had countless dreams about him, tangled in her bedsheets alongside her as the morning crept through, waking her up with his voice in her ear and his hand slipping under her, down her torso, to wake her up with lazy kisses and touches and not-so-lazy fucking. 

The memory of that conversation registers sleepily in some half-hidden corner of her mind as she feels his hand steal between her skin and the mattress to cup her breast. 

“Morning.” She hums it more than she says it and then sighs contentedly as she feels him hitch his body over hers, pressing his chest against her back and letting his weight fall against her so he can press his face into the side of her neck and kiss, though he’s really just letting his mouth drag slackly over her skin. She reaches a hand back to tickle her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck - she loves touching his hair - and shuffles her body to press solidly against his.

He’s already half-erect, and she smiles and murmurs, “Jesus, don’t you ever get tired?”

“Let’s find out,” he says, and she can feel his smile on her neck before he presses another slow kiss down and drags it along her collar bone. He slides a hand up her side, just on the firm side of tickling, and nudges her arm up over her head towards the headboard. He takes a moment to kiss over the curve of her shoulder, then works his hand back down her side and cups her hip. He spends a minute running his thumb along the curve of her hip bone, and she can feel him take a steadying breath.

“Okay?” she asks.

“Mmm.” He nods his chin over her shoulder blade before turning his mouth to kiss at the top of her spine. “Just. Lucky.”

She thinks, that makes two of us, but she squeezes the back of his neck instead of saying it out loud.

Harvey turns his head to kiss her arm, then sits back on his knees and taps her hip with two fingers, nudging lightly until she shifts her hips off the bed. Harvey slides a pillow under her hips, smoothing a palm over her ass and up to her waist while she takes a moment to settle again. 

“Okay?” he says. He keeps checking, because it turns out Harvey is patient and attentive, almost nervous with her, and she finds it goddamn adorable. She’s gotten intimately acquainted with the Harvey who demands, who takes, who grits out his fantasies at her and nearly makes her crack apart just from the way his voice says ‘touch yourself’ or the tight growl of the very specific way he says ‘fuck’ when they’re both naked. That Harvey is devastating, but so is this Harvey, just in a different way, because of the way he lets out all the softness he has that he’s been hiding from her. 

Donna hums a yes and wiggles her butt against his hand, inviting him to push down harder. He laughs a little and leans his weight back over her so he can run his hand under her body, find her breast again, massaging lightly until she has to take a moment to push air slowly from her lungs and the tail end of her breath rags out against her throat. He thumbs her nipple, she’s always been sensitive to that, and she unconsciously pushes her hips against the pillow for purchase and relief. 

Harvey lengthens his body against hers, pressing her into the soft give of the mattress, and god, she doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to the reality of what his weight feels like against her. The imagining of him with her felt so real so much of the time, but pillows and fingers and vibrators can’t ever replicate the feel of skin on skin, of body on body, and it’s glorious. 

He kisses along the ridge of her spine, dragging a finger down the line of her neck, along her torso, under her to press against her other breast, nudging that nipple taut as well. Donna hums and it turns into a moan when he pinches with just enough pressure. She turns her head, lifts a hand behind her and finds the curve of his thigh, scratching lightly. Harvey leans over to kiss her, loose and supple, his tongue against her lips and teeth. 

He kisses her as he thumbs her nipples, and he kisses her as he slips one hand down to hug her waist back against him, he kisses her as he presses his hips against her ass, just a long, slow push, and he kisses her as he slips his arm from her waist to her hip bone and lower. 

She stops kissing him because she loses track of where she is when he slides a bent knuckle experimentally along the edge of her pussy, nudging her folds apart a little and ghosting around the edge of her clit. She huffs a low moan against his mouth and turns her head into the pillow to breathe deep and center herself. 

He strokes, shallow, for a long moment, busying himself in teasing and finding the right rhythm to make her hips shift and push back against his cock. Donna feels distantly smug at the way his breath catches in his lungs, once or twice, and she can feel him growing harder when she nudges properly along his length. 

Without breaking the slow rhythm of his knuckle slipping along her, just a touch inside, Harvey sits back on his knees, lands a hand on the curve of her hip, and pulls her back firmly against him. “God, you feel good,” he says, almost to himself, almost like he thinks that despite everything, despite the last 12 hours, he might be dreaming of her like he has hundreds of times before, like he told her more than once, on the phone, just before he told her he was going to come. 

“Harvey,” Donna says, but it sounds like  _ please _ , and then she punches into a deep sigh when he turns his hand and finds her clit with two fingers, light even circling and the flat of his fingertips not-quite tickling and not-quite pushing, a spare finger still slipping between her lips to edge into her a little.

She pushes back, relaxes, pushes back again. His hips rock against hers in response, almost unconsciously, and she finds a rhythm that only takes a few moments to have air punching out of his lungs in time with her movements. He shunts back from her for a moment to stroke himself with the same tight precision he’s circling her clit with, and Donna can feel him trying to find some relief and trying not to lose control. 

Harvey, right on the edge of blind instinct, masturbating while he strokes her, bending to drop a loose kiss at the small of her back, is possibly one of the most devastatingly sensual things Donna has ever experienced. She can feel the tight coil forming low in her belly, feel her legs twitch, feel the way her hands fist into the bedsheet for some kind of grounding. She tries to tell him she’s close but she can’t seem to remember the words and instead just hopes he can hear it in the way her moans are getting caught on the edge of her lungs and in the rush of wet past his fingers. 

A second later her orgasm rushes through her, and she’s barely through the first wave of it when Harvey sets his hips back over his knees, hugs both hips under his palms, then releases one hip to stroke himself straight for a second. He positions his hips, and half pushes himself, half pulls her, slipping the head of his cock in between her folds. He pauses for just a second before hitching against her and pushing, slow and deep, inside her, pulling a gasp from both of them as her clenching muscles find and grip him. It’s much, much too much, and she buries her face into the crook of her elbow to shut out some of the sensations because otherwise she genuinely thinks she’ll pass out. 

“Donna,” he breathes, stilling, letting her adjust to him and letting the main wave slow around his cock. He lands both hands on her hips, bends to kiss her spine.

Donna slides down from the high, lets herself drift for a second, dopamine stretching out the soreness in her muscles from the previous night, and she says his name back to him. He lays his hand along her back, running his palm over her skin, and it’s such a tender moment that she almost says ‘I love you’. She doesn’t, but she doesn’t think either of them would have been surprised if she had.

He’d have said it back. They’ve said it in every way but using the words, a thousand times over. 

Instead, he says her name again like he’s discovered an ancient, forgotten language, and pulls back before stroking back in. He’s big, and he’s never been particularly arrogant about it - it just is, but goddamn if this isn’t the position he’s been designed for. The tip of his cock slides so deep that he edges right up against her back wall, forcing a guttural moan from her. 

He sets up a slow, driving rhythm, stretching her around him with each thrust and stroke, gripping her hips for purchase and also, it feels like, to remind himself this is still real. Donna finds his rhythm and pushes her hips back as he thrusts forward. 

He takes his time, slowly pushing into her, he’s chasing touch and to be deep, not speed. She just wants him in her and he feels like he wants the same, just to be inside, just to feel her tight and clenching around him, just to know the way he fits, the way they fit, all space and breath and built for each other. 

He seems like he’s holding control, just, while he takes long, quiet minutes where the only sound is them both trying to control their breathing and occasionally saying each other’s names into the atmosphere. But then Donna slips a hand between her legs, up to Harvey, cups his balls, and massages them in her palm.

“ _ Fuck _ . Donna. Fucking hell,” Harvey says, snapping his hips against her ass, his fingers gripping her hips hard enough to bruise, which she takes distant pleasure in, knowing she’ll see the evidence of this moment for several days anytime she steps out of the shower. 

She teases him, bracing on her other arm to press back against him, and she can feel the way oxygen is punching through him in the way his belly expands against the small of her back, and she’s never particularly found the sound of skin hitting skin arousing, but it’s Harvey’s skin against hers and that thought tips her right to the edge.

Harvey says, “Jesus, Donna, wait, I can’t -“ but that’s all he manages before his hips smack solidly into hers and he punches out his orgasm into her, his lungs ragging a gasp she can feel on the skin of her back.

He’s deep and it’s almost all she needs anyway. She lets him go, brings her hand forward to her clit, and only needs a couple of moments to flatten her hand over herself before she’s clamping around him with an orgasm so strong she distantly thinks how stupid they are that it took them 15 goddamn years to get here. 

“You’re a fucking idiot,” she says, when she can talk again.

Harvey laughs, because he knows exactly what she means. “You’re goddamn stupid,” he says back, pressing a line of kisses down her spine as he slips out of her to settle against her, wrapping his arms around her and drawing her to him as he shuffles onto his side.

“The stupidest,” she murmurs, sleepily, and falls back into dreaming with his leg hooked over hers and her hand stretched behind her to cradle his neck. 

-

He calls just after he leaves, which is soon after Louis stalks out of her apartment and then after they get distracted for long minutes after she tells him to fight for Robert’s name and he says he’d rather just kiss her for a while and then does exactly that.

“Hey,” he says, and it’s been maybe fifteen minutes, but god, she missed his voice and she misses the way he takes up all the spare space in her and around her. 

“Hey,” she says back.

“Ray said it was about goddamn time.”

“Did he.”

“Handed me a spare suit and winked at me.  _ Winked _ .”

His voice is all treacle under the offence and all she wants to do is tell him to turn around immediately and for them both to take a day off so they can properly lose themselves in each other. 

“Probably for the best,” she says instead. “Your suit…”

“Smells like you.”

“Like us. But yes. A fresh suit is a bit less overt.”

“I like smelling like you,” Harvey says, so petulant that it’s only just this side of whining. 

“Are you going to do any work today or are you just going to call me to complain?”

She can practically hear his smile when he says, “no, I was planning on calling you to organise meeting you in the executive bathroom at lunch.”

Donna laughs, hangs up, and makes sure she picks the dress he really likes, the lavender one she got a couple of weeks ago.

She gets into the office, and he’s standing in the hallway talking to Louis when she rounds the corner, and he stops mid-listen to just openly stare at her.

He’s wearing the navy. It’s all she can do not to strip him down and fuck him on her old secretary’s desk. 

Goddamn Ray really knows her too well, she thinks to herself. 

He calls her a half hour later, says, “Jesus, Donna, why’d you pick that dress? I’m meant to be working and I can’t concentrate on anything.”

“You wore the navy. Do you know what that does to me?”

“That was Ray,” he protests.

“Please, like you didn’t give him that specific suit because you figured one day you’d talk your way into my bedroom again and you knew you’d want to impress me after.”

“Pretty sure I didn’t need the suit, you were impressed last night anyway. I distinctly remember impressing you like, five times.”

“I was impressed four and a half at the most.”

“Meet you in the file room? Let’s get that fifth time over the line.”

“Charming. Do your work. I’ll let you impress me tonight.”

“Deal.” Then, almost as an afterthought, like he’s said it a thousand times before, he says, “love you.”

Donna cups the receiver, blushes, and reminds herself again that she is a grown woman and grown women do not make out with their secret boyfriends in front of everyone at their job. “I love you too. And shh. Someone might hear you.”

There’s a pause, and then Harvey says ‘I love you’ again, but he hides it behind a stage cough so obvious he could have been treading the boards off-Broadway.

She laughs. “Subtle,” she says, “but you’re still an idiot.”

He does it for years after. 

  
  


-

Donna’s bad at it, saying she’s scared. 

She’s especially bad at telling Harvey she’s scared. Donna is his compass, his steadying hand, and she’s the Harvey whisperer. It’s Harvey that needs help in parsing out his feelings, knowing what to do with the conflicting emotions crackling inside of him, not Donna. 

And besides, Donna has learned her lessons, paid for them in pain and in heartbreak. Every time she’s told him, I’m terrified, something awful has happened to them. She gets fired and they don’t kiss when he confronts her in the bathroom, or they don’t kiss in her apartment when he says I love you and runs, or they do kiss when he’s seeing someone and everything collapses. 

She knows that it’s different now, that he’s different, she can see it in him when he looks at her and she can feel it in the way his hand seeks her out in the night when he turns in his sleep. She should have called him, said, it’s not you, said, everything is pressing in, said, I need you. 

But she only manages to almost admit it, and she picks up her phone several times, thumbing over his name, before putting it down again. 

She’s learned her lessons the hard way. She doesn’t tell people she’s scared, and now that she needs to, she doesn’t know how to put the words together. 

So it’s him that calls and not her, a few hours after she’d left him standing confused in the file room, after trying to tell him about Faye and not being able to force the words out.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey,” he says, and god, his voice - it’s the soft, low, patient one he’s just recently discovered, and even though it’s just one word, she can hear how hard he’s trying. “You okay? I tried to find you but you weren’t around.” 

“I’m fine,” she says. Her voice is harsher than she’d anticipated, but she can’t bring herself to soften the clip in her tone because her heart is in her throat and it’s catching her lungs. “Is this important? I’m kind of busy.”

He clears his throat. “I. Ah. I feel like we left things… unresolved, back there.”

“In the file room? Or in your office?”

“Both.”

“Harvey, I’m not ready to talk about this -”

“Well, we need to.” It’s a gentle interruption, but it’s firm, and she wonders exactly when he’d found the line between confrontation and support that he’s managing to walk. “I don’t want this to sit between us.”

“Harvey-”

“Your father’s wrong.”

She’s silent, because he’s right. Harvey’s right. Her father loves her, and he’s just trying to protect her, but Jim has only seen the part of Harvey that everyone sees, where he sacrifices his own humanity to protect himself and the people close to him. It looks like arrogance and selfishness, but it isn’t. Harvey doesn’t shut off his empathy because he doesn’t care, but because he cares too much. Jim, like everyone else, just about, has missed almost all of who Harvey is. 

She knows it, that Harvey’s right, but the words she should say don’t come. 

“I know I’ve done some shitty things to you,” he says finally, into the silence. “I know it. You’ve already forgiven me way more than you should ever have to. But you know I’d do everything for you. You know that.”

“Would you?” It comes out automatically, and she feels her fear and all the things she’s spent years hiding from him, the things she’s still hiding from him, bubbling up to the surface, and there’s an uncontrollable swing inside her that’s racing between  _ shut up _ and  _ fuck it _ . 

She hears him suck in a surprised breath. “ _ Donna _ -”

“Because you spent years avoiding doing  _ anything _ , let alone everything.”

“It took me too long to figure it out, I know-”

“You figured it out when I finally walked away. Do you think that was just a coincidence? You panicked.”

“Should I not have?”

“I love you. I’m happy you came when you did. But it hurts, Harvey. It hurts that it took Thomas to make you see me.”

There’s a long, brittle moment of silence when she says it. She can feel Harvey wrestling with whatever it is he feels like he should say next, she can hear his breath shallow in his lungs, and she can feel him fighting his own pride. Maybe he wants to fight, or maybe he wants to apologise - she can’t tell. 

In the end, he does neither. Instead, he says, “I told my mother. About us.”

“Do you want credit for that?” She flinches as she says it. 

“Fucking hell, Donna. I’m trying here. I know I’m not good at this stuff. But you can’t just point out everything I need to work on and then shut me out when I’m trying to talk to you about it.”

_ Jesus _ , she thinks, and she can feel her heart cracking against her ribcage, the fight-or-flight of it all making her hands twitch. It’s always been like this between them, the back-and-forth, the tension, the challenge, and that’s always felt like a comfort, but it’s not often she’s been the one who’s cornered, and it’s not often he’s the one finding all the right words and the openness while she throws walls up like her life depends on it. “I...Harvey...”

“I don’t need you to be perfect, Donna. Just, be...”

“Be  _ what _ .”

_ Fucking hell _ , she thinks as she says it, but she’s panicking, and Harvey’s gentle insistence is spiking her heart rate. Her brain is screaming, tell him, and her heart is hammering ‘no’ at the same time. She knows, rationally, that telling him that she’s drowning is what she needs to do, but self-preservation is screaming louder than logic. 

“Be fucking  _ honest.”  _

“Harvey, if I was honest with you all the time you never would have shown up at my door.”

He stops for a silent, harsh moment. She wonders if he’ll hang up. 

He starts, “that’s not fair, Donna -”

And then, finally, it tumbles out of her. “Harvey, I’m goddamn  _ terrified _ .”

He takes a hushed breath, pauses, says, “... you are?”

“I’m so scared. You have no idea.” It’s almost a relief to say it. “You’re just… you’re the person people talk about in textbooks, Harvey. I’m scared of your shadow.” She dips her head, tries to shake the trembling out of her hand. “I know this...us… shouldn’t scare me, but…I’ve worked so hard for everything I have. I feel like I’m being forced to choose. I don’t want to.”

“Donna. This is a huge change for both of us, even without everyone else adding their piece. We’re going to have to work it out. It’s not always going to be easy. I’m going to screw this up and so are you. But… I love you. Whatever you need, I’m here. I’m scared too. But not of us. I’m not. We are going to make it.”

“But, the firm -”

“ _ Fuck _ the firm,” he says, and it’s the most aggressive she’s heard him since she picked up the phone - rough and angry and the kind of protective that she’s long known of him but layered now with love that she thinks has always been there but that he’s just now letting out. “I don’t care. You’ve earned everything you have. Everything. Nobody’s making you choose.”

Donna closes her eyes, lets her breath settle in her lungs. It keeps surprising her, the ferocity of his love for her. She can’t decide if it’s overwhelming or comforting or some unlikely combination of both. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to snap. I’m too used to trying to win these things.”

“Me too.” 

“We’re still good at fighting.”

“I let you win that one,” he says, letting humour break through the rigidity in the air. 

She laughs into the relief, says, “I’ll pay you back later.”

“Love you.”

“Love you.”

Her smile lasts until Faye tears her down again. 

  
  


-

He still calls. 

It’s during the day now, not at night - at night they’re virtually inseparable. But during the day, he’ll pepper her phone with calls - when he’s in the car on the way to a meeting, or in line at the hot dog cart, or in recess at court. 

“Fucking judge is a nightmare,” he’ll say, and grouse at her while she eats lunch and waves Louis off when he comes in to offer her some of his prunie. 

Or he’ll ask if she wants a bagel, and she’ll say no, and he’ll bring her one anyway. “I know you’d just take mine otherwise,” he says, which Donna admits is true. She takes his anyway; she likes the indignation on his face (it’s cute) and she likes having to make up for stealing his food later (it’s hot). 

Or he’ll call to say, did she want tickets to that show that’s opened that nobody can get tickets for? He has a Wall Street trader who owes him a favour. 

He calls on the way home to ask, red or white?

He calls to say he’s leaving the office and he’ll see her soon. 

He calls to ask the navy or the grey, and she says the navy of course, and he says that’s what he thought she was going to say and he’s already wearing it. Donna tells him she’ll take it off him later. 

He calls when he’s lost, neck deep in the middle of a Toys’R’Us and panicking about presents for his nieces. She asks what on earth led him to setting foot in an actual toy store, and he says it felt like a good idea at the time and please just help. 

Every now and then, before he’d turned up at her door, she’d fantasised about being with him like this. Not just the longing lust, the imagination of what he’d taste like and what the warmth of his skin would feel like under her fingertips, but this - the tiny details. Conversations and texts, snatched discussions and meaningless decisions - she imagined them, and she had thought that it might take the edge off all the late night calls and fantasies they spoke out into the dark. 

To her surprise, they didn’t. Harvey had always been someone sat in her minds eye, devastating and mind blowing and distracting. Harvey, calling her about plans for Wednesday night or if she remembers where he left his wallet, doesn’t dilute that other Harvey as much as he fleshes it out. 

She’s not just in love with an idea, anymore. Harvey, out of the shadows and in the light, showing her all of who he is, is… well, it’s everything. 

It’s only a few weeks in when she has a single, clear thought. 

_ This is actually it _ .  _ This is actually it _ . As long as she lives, she knows in that moment, there won’t be anyone else. 

She isn’t scared. 

-

“Hey.”

“Hey. Are you settled?”

“Just got in. Took a while to get the car back on the road.”

“How’s Samantha?”

“Jumpy. Focused. Angry. You know, the usual.”

She can hear his pout all the way down the phone. “You tried to talk her into getting burgers, didn’t you?”

“She blew me off and she wasn’t happy about it. Why doesn’t  _ anyone _ like burgers?”

“Room okay?”

“It’ll do. Miss you.”

“Miss you too.” Harvey’s outed himself as a cuddler and he hates being away from her for a night. “I was kinda hoping I’d be able to get home to you tonight.” 

They’d been busy, flat tack, and Harvey and Donna had agreed a week or so ago that tonight would be a night to spend, just the two of them, camped out on her living room floor with take out and their phones off and in a kitchen drawer. 

Instead, he’s in some shitty motel in the middle of nowhere and Donna’s in bed and thinking about how much bigger it feels when he’s not beside her, reading whatever case file he didn’t get through before leaving for the night (he’s suddenly discovered the benefits of leaving work on time) and absentmindedly running the backs of his fingers over her arm or shoulder or back. And it’s definitely too big for the times where the case file gets discarded in the entrance way with his coat because he stalks into her house like he owns it, owns her, and has her pressed into her mattress moments later. 

His place is the same, he says - too big when it’s just him, perfect when it’s them.

“I know,” she says. “I got fresh coffee beans so I could wait up for you to call.” She smiles ruefully. “You probably should have told me you weren’t going to get the car running again until midnight before I got through that whole french press.” 

“Wired?”

“A little. You?”

“I had too much soda. I’m about to bounce off the goddamn ceiling.”

“I told you. Rest stop food is always a bad idea.”

“I’m going to have to do laps in the pool for five hours to work out all the caffeine.”

“I can think of a better use for all that energy.”

“Yeah? What’s that?” he says, sounding distracted and missing the clear invitation in her tone. She can hear him rummaging. Harvey is a curious soul, and he buries that under suits and cynicism, but it always shows itself in the way he has to open every drawer and cupboard the second he walks into an unfamiliar hotel room. She hears him huff his annoyance and murmur, “no bar fridge, goddamn ridiculous,” and she can’t help the way her heart grows three sizes for the way she loves this ridiculous, frustrating, curious, beautiful idiot. 

“What are you wearing?” she says, kicking the sultriness in her tone up a notch. 

“You know what I’m wearing, you tore it off me this morning while I was trying not to be late.”

“You look good in that jacket, I couldn’t help myself.”

“It’s scratchy.”

God, he’s a child and he’s still completely oblivious, but she loves him all the more for it. “It’s sexy. Take it off.”

“Donna Paulsen, are you trying to seduce me?” Harvey says and she swears there’s humour bubbling under there, and maybe he was just stringing her along the whole time. 

“I’m just trying to get this call finished in time for my secret lover to come over.”

Harvey chuckles. “Tell him not to leave his stuff all over the place next time. He’s messy.”

Donna laughs, stretches out, settles her free hand on her stomach. “I’ll remind him.”

“Jacket’s off.”

“Unbutton your shirt.”

“I hope you’re joining me.”

“Three steps ahead of you,” she says. She’s already slipped out of her silk top and bottoms while they were talking, and she’s only in her panties.

There was a world, once, where this, telling each other to get undressed over the phone, was a shadowed secret they both hid and shame chased them both in circles over it. It’s different, knowing that it’s now just them, lovers, finding ways to be together when distance gets in between them, but he’s still got that voice, that gravel, and he’s still goddamn hot when he rumbles it down the line to her. 

“I’m in bed. On your side. Your pillow smells like you.” 

“Mmm. Camera.”

Donna turns on her speaker and camera, and she’s greeted by Harvey, his shirt unbuttoned and open, and he breaks into a smile that’s some unknowable mixture of lust and love, says, “hey, beautiful.”

This is new, and still experimental. The first time Harvey had to stay at his and Donna had to stay at hers, he’d called, turned his video on, just to talk, but she missed him, missed his body, told him so. He told her to tell him what to do, and she’d coaxed him to orgasm, and it had felt sweet and awkward and unnatural. 

There’s a part of her, and him as well, she thinks, that still feels like this should feel like this is something they shouldn’t do. A decade of keeping each other secret doesn’t undo itself easily. The camera helps, in a weird way. It feels like proof they aren’t lying anymore.

“Hey,” Donna says back, the word softening with want. “Shirt.”

He props his phone against a pillow at the same time she does, and then Donna settles back on her side and watches him shuck his shirt off his shoulders. Harvey looks up as he does, sees Donna laid back and mostly naked, and she can see him draw in a deep breath. He sits back against the headboard, lets his hands fall into his lap. 

She loves when he looks like this, shirtless, torso dipping into trousers or jeans, casting off the rigidity of the day and the suits he wears like armour. She loves that he’s all at once sharper and softer without them, and she loves that it’s only her that gets to see him this way. 

He just cocks his head at her, doesn’t need to say anything, and Donna takes a moment to imagine his lips on hers, his mouth sliding down her neck, she tips her head to the side like she needs to make space for him and slips her hand over a breast at the same time. She takes a long moment to tease her nipples upright, one and then the other, while Harvey hums lightly, tells her slowly, slowly, tells her she’s gorgeous.

Donna is quick and capable with masturbation. She knows her body well, knows exactly how and where to touch. She’s used it like foreplay in the past, before dates or before she called Harvey or Harvey called her, and she’s also been perfunctory with it, using it to scratch an itch or relax herself before bed or in the executive bathroom in times where she and Harvey weren’t on good terms and she needed to try and get the thought of him out of her head. She can take hours or moments and anything in between. It’s not like it was boring, exactly. Just… efficient. 

She had never expected that Harvey would change everything. But he does, with the way he looks at her, now that she can see it, with the way his voice still drags, but it’s less dark and more heat, now, and with the way he doesn’t try to pretend he’s not thinking about her when he touches himself.

It doesn’t feel like foreplay or relief anymore. It feels like how it was always meant to feel, if only she’d been paying more attention. 

She thumbs over her nipple slowly, teasing more than anything else, but even when it’s just her she’s still sensitive there and so it’s only a moment before she’s shifting her hips a little, involuntarily, and she wonders dimly why she didn’t pull a pillow in between her legs for some relief like she normally would. 

“God. Your body is gorgeous. You’re perfect,” Harvey murmurs, and she thinks, that’s why. He’s way too distracting.

She slips a hand between her legs, over her panties, presses the heel of her palm down firmly for some friction. “You better be joining me,” she says and her voice is already mostly oxygen and a half octave lower than normal. 

Harvey pops the button at his waist, hitches his hips up to slide his jeans and boxers low under his hips. He sits back again, idly stroking one hand over his cock, says, “are you wet?”

There’s something about the way he says it that always makes her stomach flip, and if she hadn’t been wet before those three words would have done it. She feels a rush of damp making her panties slick and says, “mmm. Make yourself hard for me.”

Harvey grips the tip of his cock, thumbing the slit, and then sets up a steady pattern; twisting his palm a little as he strokes down to his base, back up, then a couple of rolls of his wrist over his head, and then back down again. He spits into his palm for lubrication, and that shouldn’t be anywhere near as hot as Donna finds it to be. 

He says, “I wish I was sucking your clit,” and that low octave he’s found coils in her belly, makes her hiss his name, and she instinctively slips a hand under her panties. 

Harvey shakes his head slightly. “Off,” he says. “I want to see.” 

Donna lifts her hips, slips her panties down over her hips and off, dropping them behind her. It’s perfunctory but she doesn’t care and neither does Harvey - the first time they’d tried this, she’d tried to undress herself seductively but there’s a reason that only happens in movies. In real life people have hips and buttons that catch and zips that stick and after all clothes are designed to stay on bodies, so they don’t come off easily or sexily. They’d ended up both collapsing in a fit of giggles when she’d gotten her pants leg caught in her sock and they’d both agreed that they’re more interested in the person and body underneath the clothes then how they get to the body in the first place. 

He’s probably remembering that as well because he’s got a raised eyebrow and there’s a smile playing over his face when she sits back again, and she laughs. “Don’t say a word,” she says, and pushes her palm over her pubic bone, edging her clit with the tip of a finger. 

Harvey looks studiously innocent, but there’s lust sitting underneath it all and it’s only a moment before he’s breathing out her name again and settling into a slow rhythm with his hand slicking down the length of his cock. “Donna,” he says. “Fucking hell.”

Donna copies his speed, flattening two fingers lightly over her clit slowly, dipping down to slide her fingertips between her folds, slicking them before moving back to circle again. It takes a moment for her sensitivity to settle enough for her to press down firmly, and she breathes deep into her stomach when she does. 

Harvey has a thing for making Donna take that specific breath, the one she takes when she’s breathing through lust and trying not to spin off into oblivion, and when she sighs over it he says, “Jesus, Donna, your voice,” and pumps faster, shuffling his hips for friction, and the sounds of the wet slap of pre-come slicking between his hand and his cock shakes something primal in her loose.

She says, “Harvey,” but it’s all she can manage before the breath in her lungs catches in her throat and she has to stop talking so she can focus on the way her body is scrabbling towards release.

“Inside,” he grunts.

Donna’s fierce and independent and a feminist to her core, but there’s something about being told how to touch herself, told what to do, by Harvey, by that deep gravel, that spikes a deep hum of lust and pleasure through her. She hitches her hips up and pushes a finger inside her pussy, then another, crooking her fingers until she finds just the right spot to press down, there, and the heel of her palm pushes down over her clit. “God,” she says. 

“Tell me.”

“Feels good. I’m so wet. Fuck I wish it was you.” She keeps her eyes on him, fighting the urge to close them and roll onto her back for oxygen as her walls squeeze down on her fingers. 

Harvey holds her gaze, pumping his hand over his cock, his other hand sliding down as well now to cup his balls, massaging and pulling slowly. “Want you,” he says, simply. “Always you. Just you.”

It’s his eyes that do it. He’s staring at her with that specific kind of clarity he’s suddenly got whenever he looks at her, since he showed up at her door after Thomas, that clarity of forever. Donna’s not even expecting it, because she’s seen that look so many times the last few months, but he looks into her, looks into her soul, and she doesn't even get his name past her lips before she feels her stomach rush through, her walls clamp down around her fingers, and the room around her blinks out as she breaks apart. 

Harvey talks her through it, telling her she’s gorgeous, she’s sexy, she’s everything he’s ever wanted, his voice catching more and more over his words as he tenses slowly, and then when Donna manages to say his name out loud, he comes as well, stilling his hand for a moment to huff breath into his lungs. He’s goddamn gorgeous, skin slick with sweat and semen, breathing her name over and over, and the sight of him stretches out the waves rolling through her until she’s all dopamine, stretching and laying in the aftershocks and distantly hoping this feeling lasts forever. 

When she blinks her eyes open again, Harvey’s grinning sleepily, one arm tucked up behind his head, and he says, “hey.”

Donna rolls onto her stomach, hugs her pillow, the one that smells of his shampoo, to her chest, murmurs, “hey,” back. 

“Miss you.”

“Miss you.” She yawns. 

“You need sleep.”

“Mmm. Call me in the morning?”

“Yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow. Wait up for me.”

“Love you.”

“Love you.”

Donna hangs up, stretches herself out under the covers, and marvels, not for the first time, how being able to say that without ruining everything for them both is really something. 

-

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

It’s thanksgiving. Donna’s in her usual perch, old clothes and pleasantly full belly pressing into the waistband of her track pants, knees hitched up under her chin while she watches the fire crack and pop and draw shadow puppets on the walls. 

“Are you fat?” Harvey asks, slipping through the door and closing it behind him, and she laughs without looking up from the fire. 

“Working on it. Are you drunk?”

“I’ll get there.” As he says it, he bends over the back of the arm chair, whisky glass in one hand, wrapping his arms around her torso and dropping a kiss against the top of her head. .

It’s the … tenth? eleventh? thanksgiving in a row they’ve had with that running gag. Even when things were bad, even when he was with Paula, he still called and they still teased each other, even when it felt hollow.

It’s the first with his arms around her. 

She tips her head back, kisses him lightly and slowly. Her parents have retired for the night, they’re travelling up to Boston tomorrow night to see Marcus and the kids, to visit Lily and Gordon (Harvey’s still hurting and raw from it but he says it helps to sit with them). They’ve only managed a couple of days off together - Mike’s firm has come to rely on both of them - so it’s felt busier than it should, and there’s a lot to do and lots of people to see.

Still, doing it all with him hovering, touching the small of her back, stealing kisses in hallways as they pass by each other and murmuring into her ear that she’s doing great, that he’s there, that he loves her? Well, that makes everything feel much less like stress than it should.

It’s the first time Harvey’s met her mom, which should be terrifying but isn’t. Harvey has so quickly become her forever that Donna doesn’t even think about it until they’re knocking on the front door of the family house with Harvey juggling the apple pie sufganiyot that he claims he’d made. She leans into traditional panic for just a second, the moment before the door opens after the bell ring.

Harvey, who had broken up her and Thomas. Harvey, who had been a subject of her bitter complaints down the phone to her mom for years. Harvey, who’d hurt Donna, however unintentionally, and who she’d probably hyperbolised into some kind of monster in her mom’s imagination. Harvey, who married her daughter on a whim with a half hours notice, stealing her mom’s opportunity to watch her come down the aisle, to help plan, to help fuss.

“Oh my god, what if mom hates you?” she says, suddenly horrified. 

Harvey just laughs, and says, “don’t you worry, I hear the Paulsen women find me irresistible.” He kisses her temple - he loves doing that - and straightens up just as the door opens.

Donna needn’t have worried. Harvey has this underlying love of being coddled and looked after, even if he doesn’t need it, and it shines like a beacon, and not just to Donna. Clara latches onto him like a long lost son immediately. She takes to Harvey so naturally and wholeheartedly that Donna finds herself, halfway through the evening, in the kitchen with Harvey, pouting.

“I think she loves you more than me,” she says as she bends to check the pumpkin pie cooking slowly in the oven.

Harvey pats Donna’s ass affectionately as he shimmies behind her with a jug of heavy cream. “I can’t help it if she finds me devastatingly charming,” he says happily. 

“You’re devastatingly insufferable. You know that, right?”

Harvey laughs and turns back to her just as she straightens, slips his arms around her waist and kisses her. “I thought that was one of the qualities you admire the most about me.”

“Don’t tell anyone.”

And so, hours later, as Harvey sets himself down in front of the fire, barefoot and in track pants and an old sweater, leaning his back against her shins, there’s a kind of quiet satisfaction that’s settled on her. She drops a hand to play idly, scratching his scalp and threading fingers through his hair in the way that makes him hum contentedly. 

This, she thinks, is how it was always meant to be. 

They talk, laugh quietly, trying not to wake her parents, which is harder when Harvey makes some stupid joke that’s only funny because it’s late and they’re both onto their third nightcap and they collapse into a fit of giggles that Donna muffles in the collar of her sweatshirt and Harvey presses into his glass.

She eventually brings calm when she leans forward to wrap her arms around him, crossing them over his torso, and she kisses the side of his neck. “I’m exhausted,” she murmurs, “and we have a flight tomorrow.”

They pad upstairs, brush their teeth together, holding hands like teenagers as they do. Clara has long turned Donna’s bedroom into a crafting and sewing office, and so the attic, a single bed perched under the skylight in the sloping ceiling is still her ‘room’, which makes Harvey laugh.

“You finally bring your boyfriend home for thanksgiving and we’re still less important than the sewing machine,” he says.

“She’s probably seeing if you’ll take first.”

“Bring a lot of guys home for thanksgiving, do you?”

“Sometimes two or three at a time,” Donna teases evenly. “If you’re still around next year we might qualify for a pull out sofa or something.” She tugs his hand. “It’s cold. Come on.”

She slips into bed and Harvey climbs in beside her. It’s a tight fit, but Harvey opens his arm and his chest to her, and she settles, snugged against him, pillowing her hair against his shoulder. He slips a leg between hers. 

“See? Not so bad,” she says, hugging him around the waist and yawning as she stretches her body against his. 

“I’m bringing a mattress next year. A big one,” he says, but he doesn’t sound like he means it. 

“Mom already knows you’re a cuddler. She’ll see right through it.”

They talk, and laugh quietly in the inky blackness, and sometimes she thinks, this is where he’s really him, and he’s showing him to her only. 

“Happy thanksgiving, Donna.” He doesn’t say he loves her. He doesn’t have to. 

She knows.

“Happy thanksgiving, Harvey.”

She waits until he falls asleep, and she smiles.

  
  
  
_end_   
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's weird to send this one off into the sunset. Thanks to everyone who stuck by this ridiculous idea from a single line of dialogue that somehow stretched out over tens of thousands of words. They are beautiful idiots and I love them. 
> 
> Thanks as always to Aditi for the beta and Luisa for the hostage negotiations. 
> 
> If you liked it, say hi. If you hated it, say hi too.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! This is also a jump off from a much more innocent piece I wrote (Follow) where Donna mentions to Rachel that Harvey falls asleep on the phone a lot. I liked that idea and wanted to explore it. There's so much backstory to Harvey and Donna and it feels like a crime that it's been so unexplored. 
> 
> I promised when I started writing this is wasn't going to be quite so... explicit. 
> 
> If you enjoyed, I'd love to hear your feedback! If you didn't, I'd also love to hear your feedback!


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